Towards a pluralist labor geography: Constrained grassroots agency and the socio-spatial fix in Dȇrsim, Turkey

Abstract

This paper explores the interplay between capital, socio-spatial structure and grassroots agency in the context of the recent trajectories of labor geography. Based on field research conducted in Dȇrsim, Turkey, our analysis unfolds the constraining role of socio-spatial structure in the agency and praxis of grassroots movements and their geography-making and crisis-displacement from below. Through the case study, we propound a concept of socio-spatial fix to explain how this praxis conjoins with and assists capital in both staving off its recurrent crises and reproducing its own logic of accumulation. Our analysis reveals that the socio-spatial fix in Dȇrsim, which is constituted by the grassroots struggle against hydroelectric power plant projects, performs three functions. First, it facilitates the production of capitalist social relations and spaces; second, it strengthens and maintains the existing social order through temporally moderating the province’s chronic problems; and third, it provides legitimacy for the capitalist exploitation of nature, culture and histories. Our research contributes to the emerging pluralist school of labor geography, providing an empirically substantiated insight into how capital reproduces itself via socio-spatial fixes produced by constrained grassroots agency.

Whole Person Promotion, Women, and the Post-Pandemic Era

“…This intersectionality is a distinct factor in our view. It creates processes of commodification and de-commodification, for example of land and labour, influenced primarily by violence and subjugation, extreme alienation and oppression where the expropriation of land and destruction of nature is coupled with diffused dispossession, public health disruption, and the erosion of the role of the state (Ağar and Böhm, 2018;Bohm and Pascucci, 2020). This dynamic is of particular relevance when considering how Mafia-like organizations have managed to create markets in contexts of extreme violence, expulsion, displacement and dispossession.…”

“…The presence of competing legal and illegal market economies create continuous tensions not only between the state and violent organizations, but also among and between other social and economic actors, enacting processes of place dispossession, and displacement (Harvey, 2002). Looking at these tensions is of particular interest to theorize about how forms of social embeddedness emerge in the production and reproduction of socio-ecological crises (Ekers and Prudham, 2017;Ağar and Böhm, 2018;Bohm and Pascucci, 2020).…”

Transformative perspectives on labour geographies – The role of labour agency in processes of socioecological transformations

“…As a consequence, their actions and decisions immediately impact production structures. Thus, they do not only constitute forms of labour agency beyond “worker/union‐centrism” (Ağar & Böhm, 2018, p. 5) but they also challenge current production structures through (increased) democratisation and participation. In this vein, labour agency is implemented in alignment with principles of a deeper socioecological transformation (see Part II) and can, thus, potentially contribute towards it.…”

The multiple geographies of constrained labour agency

“…In developing a constrained and variegated understanding of labour agency from a broadly structurationist perspective, four sets of social relations in which workers are inevitably, but differentially, positioned were identified: the structures of capital, notably global production networks; multiscalar state institutions; the associational life of the community; and intermediary agents in the labour market. For some scholars, this was a frustratingly meso-level framework that did not adequately foreground the deeper structural forces within capitalism – most notably capital-labour class relations – that inevitably underpin the complex patterns of agency being described, and how those relations are reproduced (Ağar and Böhm, 2018; Das, 2012). From such a perspective, labour agency is always and unavoidably conditioned by the structuring conditions of capitalism, relating to dynamics of competition, crises of overaccumulation and the continual outwards expansion of capitalist relations within society (Bieler, 2018).…”