Abstract:After declaring a state of emergency on 20 July, 2016 as a response to the failed coup attempt of 15 July, 2016, the Turkish government launched a nation-wide academic purge, especially targeting the Academics for Peace. This group of academics signed a peace petition in January 2016 to address civilian deaths in the South-Eastern part of the country and to urge the government to take responsibility and restart the peace process. Having the largest number of peace petitioners among Turkey's provincial universities, Kocaeli University was the first to dismiss all 19 of the peace academics from their positions on 1 September, 2016. Already active in defending the universal values of academia in other venues, these dismissed peace academics founded the Kocaeli Academy of Solidarity in pursuit of an alternative academy that aims to bring together university students, NGO members and ordinary citizens in the city in a cooperative understanding of education and research. After weekly seminars over eight months, a summer school of five days, and with applications in for funding its projects, particularly amongst others the School of Life, Kocaeli Academy for Solidarity has a strong determination to demonstrate a new democratic model of education and research.

How do we interpret the extraordinary visibility and ordinariness of social media as delivery workers resist their precarious working lives? Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, photo elicitation, and digital data collection in Turkey with a focus on delivery workers’ strikes in early 2022, we argue that understanding the delivery workers’ movement requires not only considering spectacular strikes and social media protests but also workers’ everyday forms of resistance and their ordinary uses of social media as part of what we call weapons of the gig. Although not as visible as spectacular street action and social media campaigns, these weapons (motorcycle drivers’ solidarity, algorithmic resistance, and social media use for information sharing, as well as production of humor and resentment) enable the subtle formation of a movement. Our contribution lies in reframing social media use as both an ordinary and extraordinary weapon of delivery workers and approaching workers’ solidarity as a question of continuum. Enabling us to look beyond the antagonisms in the labor process and locate affective tensions in the everyday, this approach allows for seeing workers not only as economic but also as political and affective subjects demanding freedom and searching for meaningful connection in their lives.

Abstract:After declaring a state of emergency on 20 July, 2016 as a response to the failed coup attempt of 15 July, 2016, the Turkish government launched a nation-wide academic purge, especially targeting the Academics for Peace. This group of academics signed a peace petition in January 2016 to address civilian deaths in the South-Eastern part of the country and to urge the government to take responsibility and restart the peace process. Having the largest number of peace petitioners among Turkey's provincial universities, Kocaeli University was the first to dismiss all 19 of the peace academics from their positions on 1 September, 2016. Already active in defending the universal values of academia in other venues, these dismissed peace academics founded the Kocaeli Academy of Solidarity in pursuit of an alternative academy that aims to bring together university students, NGO members and ordinary citizens in the city in a cooperative understanding of education and research. After weekly seminars over eight months, a summer school of five days, and with applications in for funding its projects, particularly amongst others the School of Life, Kocaeli Academy for Solidarity has a strong determination to demonstrate a new democratic model of education and research.

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