In this guest post Dr Eda Beyazit describes the making of ‘Servis: commoning commutes’, a documentary on precarity, class and daily mobilities of female domestic workers, funded by a Knowledge Mobilisation Award from the Urban Studies Foundation. The documentary is a collaboration between Dr Beyazit, Erhan Kuğu and Volkan Kisa.
‘Servis: commoning commutes’ is available to watch now on YouTube (click here).
I have been fortunate to receive a Knowledge Mobilisation Award from the Urban Studies Foundation (2024) to produce a documentary on the daily mobility experiences of female domestic workers in Istanbul. The film builds on my earlier research on mobility, gender, and precarity, including a USF international fellowship that allowed me to spend nine months at the University of Manchester.
With this piece, I want to do two things: reflect on how this line of research evolved over time, and share what the process of making a documentary revealed about mobility as something lived, negotiated, and embedded in everyday life[1]. Because my reflections on this research topic are closely connected to the making of the documentary, I would like to use a slightly cinematic language: a prequel, the action, and a sequel to share my thoughts.
Prequel.
My engagement with the mobility of female domestic workers began in 2015. At that time, much of the literature suggested that women’s mobility was relatively restricted, often confined to their immediate neighbourhoods due to care responsibilities and social norms[2]. While this was also apparent in Istanbul[3] and other cities in the Global South, particularly among lower-income groups[4], a more complex mobility pattern for female domestic workers was evident[5];[6].
For many female domestic workers, commuting was not so restricted. Women were travelling long distances across the city, often at significant financial and physical cost, to access work. What mattered most was not proximity, but trust[7]. Accepting a job depended less on the distance and more on whether the employer was viewed as trustworthy and safe to work with. Mobility, in this sense, became something women were willing to negotiate and endure to secure income from a trusted employer.
When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted public transport systems, these already fragile patterns of movement became even more precarious. Domestic workers were among the most affected groups globally, facing both loss of income and increased risks associated with travel[8].
During this time, I reconnected with women I had previously worked with. In these conversations, I encountered a small but remarkable initiative. A group of domestic workers living in the peripheries of Istanbul had organised their own shuttle service – a servis – connecting their homes to workplaces in wealthier, often poorly serviced neighbourhoods. What began as a practical response to a crisis quickly became something more: a shared infrastructure of care, trust, and survival.
This experience led to further ethnographic work, travelling with the women, observing their journeys, and spending time in their workplaces, which eventually resulted in an academic article as one of my outputs as a USF fellow[9]. But it also raised a different question: how could these experiences be communicated in a way that does justice to their depth and conveys the emotions?
Gül’s story
I first met Gül in 2016 during my initial fieldwork. She had already spent many years working as a domestic worker and had been actively involved in advocating for workers’ rights. In the early 2000s, she played an important role in organising with other women, contributing to efforts to make domestic work more visible and to secure basic rights, such as employer-paid insurance.
Over the years, Gül has also appeared in several documentaries on domestic work. Dayworker (Gündelikçi, 2006, Dir. Emel Çelebi), Ain’t no Cinderellas! (Külkedisi değiliz!, 2014, Dir. Emel Çelebi) and Wounded Pride (Gurur Yarası, 2019, Dir. Sinem Atakul) are important works that shed light on the challenges domestic workers face and were viewed by a broader audience who are not necessarily from academic or activist circles. When I asked whether Gül would take part in this project, she told me, with a sense of pride, that this would be her fourth.
Action.
The idea of making a documentary emerged through conversations with director Erhan Kuğu, who had previously worked on films exploring urban issues in Istanbul. From the beginning, we agreed that this would not be a conventional, explanatory documentary. Instead of focusing on transport as a technical problem, we wanted to stay close to everyday life, following its rhythms, interruptions, and constraints.
Placing Gül at the centre of the documentary was not simply a narrative choice. It was a methodological one. The film unfolds through her perspective, allowing her interpretations and experiences to shape how mobility is understood. Rather than presenting her as a subject of study, the documentary positions her as someone who produces knowledge about her own life while reflecting on what it means to be a domestic worker. Gül is not a ‘case study’, she is the epistemic centre of the film.
In our film, Gül shares her story with striking openness. She reflects on how she entered domestic work, the challenges she has faced over more than two decades, and her gradually diminishing hopes for retirement. Her story is not only about work, but about sustaining life under conditions of uncertainty, balancing care responsibilities, managing health issues, and continuing to commute across a large and demanding city.
The camera follows her through early-morning journeys, long working days, her time with her family, attending to her grandchildren’s needs at work or during errands, and, most importantly, her moments of rest and reflection. At times, what she expresses in words is only part of the story. Her gestures, pauses, and silences carry meanings that cannot easily be captured through interviews alone.
As the film developed, it became increasingly clear that mobility could not be separated from other aspects of life. Decisions about when and how to travel were entangled with negotiations within the household, responsibilities of care, relationships with employers, and physical wellbeing. This experience reshaped our approach. It meant adapting to Gül’s life rather than expecting her life to adapt to the film. Filming took place around her work schedule, her care responsibilities, her health appointments, and even during long breaks as she went through surgery. In this sense, the documentary process itself became embedded within the rhythms we were trying to understand.
One of our initial aims was to capture the social life of the servis – something I had observed during fieldwork. The conversations, the jokes, the silences, the small everyday interactions that make this space meaningful. Our first day of filming made it immediately clear that this would not be straightforward. When we met Gül and approached the servis, the presence of a male camera crew was met with hesitation. Despite introductions and reassurances, the space did not easily open to us.
I travelled with the women while the crew followed separately. Conversations unfolded, stories were shared, and yet the boundaries of the space remained. Although some women expressed interest in participating, they did not follow up afterwards. Their reluctance was not surprising. The servis was not just a vehicle, it was a carefully maintained space of trust. Eventually, we recruited a female camera operator who travelled in the vehicle with other women and captured the spirit of their relationships, including the chatter, laughs, jokes, and socialising outside of work.
Sequel.
There are currently no plans for a follow-up film, but I would like to reflect on our experiences transforming research into a documentary.
Although the documentary set out to focus on transport, transport rarely appeared as the central subject. Instead, it operated in the background, shaping possibilities without always being visible. For instance, if the first question asked by husbands when domestic workers get into this field or find a different employer, is who the employer is, the second question is how you’ll get there and who you’ll travel with. If transport is a ‘supporting actor’, servis may deserve an award in the best supporting actress category: It brings women together, structures their time, creates a sense of safety, and opens up a space for sharing knowledge, experiences, and strategies. It enables work, but also sustains forms of solidarity that extend beyond the journey itself.
Documentary filmmaking, in this project, became more than a tool for communicating research. It became a way of doing research differently. By following Gül’s daily life, the film captures aspects of mobility that are often overlooked: repetition, waiting, fatigue, and the quiet labour of coordination and care.
Rather than offering solutions, the documentary opens up a different way of seeing. Documentary, here, is not just a tool for representation. It is a way of expanding what counts as knowledge. It allows us to make visible what is often overlooked, and to centre lived experience in how we understand mobility.
With this film, I hope to contribute to broader conversations about what counts as transport knowledge and how mobility injustice is understood. If research often abstracts and categorises, documentary has the potential to re-embed, bringing us back to the textures of lived experience.
In that sense, the film does not simply extend transport research. It begins to reshape it by bringing these voices to the centre of understanding of mobility, coined with care, precarity, solidarity, and trust.
Credits…
I am grateful to USF for their administrative and financial support, with special thanks going to Joe Shaw. I feel very lucky to have met Erhan Kuğu and collaborated with him on this documentary; he is a highly talented director with great potential. I also want to acknowledge the support of Gül’s family, the servis passengers, our camera crew, and our families throughout the filmmaking process. Many thanks to all of them. Additionally, I appreciate UWE CATE for granting me time to work on this film and my USF mentor, Prof. Karen Lucas, for guiding me and openly welcoming my ideas. Lastly, I am deeply grateful to Gül Korkutan, who has been the driving force behind this project.
References
[1] Please check out the seminar I gave as part of the CTS Seminar series to see my discussion of the topic in depth.
[2] For example, Hanson, S. (2010) ‘Gender and mobility: New approaches for informing sustainability’, Gender, Place & Culture, 17, pp. 5–23.
[3] Beyazit, E. and Sungur, C. (2019) Working women and unequal mobilities in the urban periphery, R. Hickman, B. Mella-Lira, M. Givoni, K. Geurs (Eds.) A Companion to Transport, Space and Equity. Edward Elgar
[4] For example, Oviedo Hernandez, D. & Titheridge, H. (2016). Mobilities of the periphery: Informality, access and social exclusion in the urban fringe in Colombia. Journal of Transport Geography. 55,152-164.
[5] Beyazit, E., Sungur C., and Karabatak İ. (2016) Social Inequalities in Urban Transport: Home-work journeys of female workers in Istanbul. July 2016, TUBITAK Final report
[6] Montoya-Robledo, V. and Escovar-Álvarez, G. (2020). Domestic workers’ commutes in Bogotá: Transportation, gender and social exclusion. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice. 139,400-411.
[7] Erman, T. and Kara, H. (2018). Female domestic workers strategizing via commuting long distance: New challenges and negotiations in neoliberalizing Turkey. Women’s Studies International Forum. 67,45–52.
[8] ILO (2022). Only six per cent of domestic workers have comprehensive social protection, says ILO. https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_848477/lang–en/index.htm
[9] Beyazit, E. and Lucas, K. (2025) ‘Precarious mobilities on the axis of changing labour and mobility dynamics: The case of female domestic workers in Istanbul during the COVID-19 pandemic’, Social & Cultural Geography, 26(6), pp. 698–718.