Dr Eda Beyazit İnce
Funding period: 1 April 2024 – 30 June 2025
Type of funding:
Other Grants
This grant was awarded as a follow-up to Negotiating precarity in everyday mobilities of women domestic workers at the times of the global pandemic.
The documentary on Precarity, class and daily mobilities of female domestic workers is a collaboration between Dr Beyazit, Erhan Kugu and Volkan Kisa.
According to Dr Beyazit, research articles, books, and academic events do not always do justice in narrating the complex challenges brought forward by precarious labour for low-income women living in cities. Therefore, policies often fail to address the needs of these groups, which are, in fact, large and increasingly politically engaged to be ignored. Through a 30-minute-long documentary, the team will explore the daily lives of female domestic workers living in the peripheral areas of Metropolitan Istanbul. They will mainly concentrate on the difficulties that individuals encounter during their daily commutes, the negotiations they have to engage in at their homes and workplaces and while on the move, and the tactics they use to navigate through these power dynamics.
There is a recent warning about the skewed power structures of knowledge mobilisation on urban matters, which exclude diverse and multiple voices, building up on expert-driven best practices. In this sense, poorer communities in global South cities are excluded not only from the policy decisions in their own countries but also from the wider policy circles (e.g. international funding programmes) due to a lack of acknowledgement of the issues they are facing. Researchers have been pushing forward agendas to internationalise urban knowledge by building on the knowledge of the global South and to enrich theories originating from the North.
This Documentary on precarity, class and daily mobilities of female domestic workers aims, therefore, to translate knowledge into policy and practice by using documentary as a medium based on the researcher’s USF-funded project on the daily mobilities of female domestic workers. Although female domestic workers face precarious working conditions coupled with intersectional burdens, a highly urban phenomenon, they have been overlooked in urban studies. The documentary will be an important platform enabling discussions on precarity, informality, class, and gendered mobilities from the domestic workers’ perspective. It will also explore how the post-pandemic crisis has affected low-income women workers and their daily mobilities.
The documentary will be filmed in Istanbul, in locations similar to domestic workers’ workplaces and residential areas, and while on the move. The narratives will be combined with images, urban sounds and music to present an artistically creative output.