Spatial Labour and the Politics of Place
PhD, completed 2023
My 2023 doctoral thesis explores the sociospatial dimensions of revolutionary struggle by looking at The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria in Rojava, Northern Syria (AANES). As a flagship project of the Kurdish Freedom Movement (KFM), I focus on the social reproduction of space and the spatial reproduction of society in the region, namely a) how, as a self-declared decolonial and feminist revolutionary paradigm, the AANES affects – is affected by - the (re)production of space; b) how this is perceived, conceptualised and represented - in writing and image - with respect to the claims and aims of the movement, and c) how participatory research methodologies can co-create sociospatial knowledge in Critical Solidarity (Bieliauskaitė, 2021; Van Katwyk, et al., 2020) with such struggles by informing the spaces they (re)produce.
In a world dominated by patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialisms old and new, much sociospatial scholarship tends to examine a) the spatial consequences of intersecting gendered and colonial oppressions and b) the spatial factors that help determine their nature and efficacy, aiming to uncover where, how and with what means feminist and decolonial battles can be fought (Smith, 1999; McKittrick, 2006; Gilmore, et al., 2022). This research works in political alignment but perspectival contrast by platforming and informing an emancipatory sociospatial paradigm that is ongoing and incomplete.
With this in mind, the project’s foundational aims are twofold. Firstly, to explore and elaborate ongoing sociospatial discourse in and on the AANES examning its coherence, relevance and applicability in relation to the region’s broader emancipatory claims and aims. Secondly, to point towards a set of sociospatial priorities as avenues for future integration and action on the ground, informing future spatial (re)production in the region and across kindred contexts and movements elsewhere.
To do this, I bring ideas of spatial practice into critical conversation with those around reproductive labour, developing in the process the political concept of Spatial Labour (a concept which includes, but is not limited to, sociospatial acts involving maintenance, adornment, and attachment). Spatial Labour is refracted through three key principles of the KFM that are of sociospatial pertinence and potential, namely Welatparezî (Love and Defence of the Homeland), Hevaltî (Love and Comradeship), and Ethics and Aesthetics (self and social political expression). I try to show that Spatial Labour can both account for and be accountable to the holistic and multiscalar aims and claims of the AANES, namely that the traditionally-fixed boundaries of territory, state, architecture, family, identity and the body are to be loosened and, therefore, liberated.
The project emerges out of multiple years of engagement with the Kurdish Solidarity Network in the UK, and I try to use the infrastructures and affordances of academia towards ends that support the KFM, while using my sociospatial expertise as a lens through which to support and cultivate its ongoing work. The project’s fieldwork component engages participants (who I recognise and refer to as my co-researchers) based in the region – namely, students at the University of Rojava enrolled in the module ‘Space, Place, Gender, Struggle’ – to explore the spaces of labour and the labour of spaces in the AANES. I combine solidarity pedagogy and auto-image-elicitation methods involving photography, body-mapping, film and cartography, to develop dialogic visual interpretation methods, in order to gather data pertaining to the spatial politics of struggle, and comes to organise this data Spatial Labour and the Politics of Place in Rojava around three key themes: hospitality, ceremony, and cultivation. In the process, it demonstrates the importance and the nuance of sociospatial thinking in the AANES, the connection between reproductive labour and spatial practice, and the potential that solidarity methodologies might have in the co-production of sociospatial knowledge.
PhD, completed 2023
My 2023 doctoral thesis explores the sociospatial dimensions of revolutionary struggle by looking at The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria in Rojava, Northern Syria (AANES). As a flagship project of the Kurdish Freedom Movement (KFM), I focus on the social reproduction of space and the spatial reproduction of society in the region, namely a) how, as a self-declared decolonial and feminist revolutionary paradigm, the AANES affects – is affected by - the (re)production of space; b) how this is perceived, conceptualised and represented - in writing and image - with respect to the claims and aims of the movement, and c) how participatory research methodologies can co-create sociospatial knowledge in Critical Solidarity (Bieliauskaitė, 2021; Van Katwyk, et al., 2020) with such struggles by informing the spaces they (re)produce.
In a world dominated by patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialisms old and new, much sociospatial scholarship tends to examine a) the spatial consequences of intersecting gendered and colonial oppressions and b) the spatial factors that help determine their nature and efficacy, aiming to uncover where, how and with what means feminist and decolonial battles can be fought (Smith, 1999; McKittrick, 2006; Gilmore, et al., 2022). This research works in political alignment but perspectival contrast by platforming and informing an emancipatory sociospatial paradigm that is ongoing and incomplete.
With this in mind, the project’s foundational aims are twofold. Firstly, to explore and elaborate ongoing sociospatial discourse in and on the AANES examning its coherence, relevance and applicability in relation to the region’s broader emancipatory claims and aims. Secondly, to point towards a set of sociospatial priorities as avenues for future integration and action on the ground, informing future spatial (re)production in the region and across kindred contexts and movements elsewhere.
To do this, I bring ideas of spatial practice into critical conversation with those around reproductive labour, developing in the process the political concept of Spatial Labour (a concept which includes, but is not limited to, sociospatial acts involving maintenance, adornment, and attachment). Spatial Labour is refracted through three key principles of the KFM that are of sociospatial pertinence and potential, namely Welatparezî (Love and Defence of the Homeland), Hevaltî (Love and Comradeship), and Ethics and Aesthetics (self and social political expression). I try to show that Spatial Labour can both account for and be accountable to the holistic and multiscalar aims and claims of the AANES, namely that the traditionally-fixed boundaries of territory, state, architecture, family, identity and the body are to be loosened and, therefore, liberated.
The project emerges out of multiple years of engagement with the Kurdish Solidarity Network in the UK, and I try to use the infrastructures and affordances of academia towards ends that support the KFM, while using my sociospatial expertise as a lens through which to support and cultivate its ongoing work. The project’s fieldwork component engages participants (who I recognise and refer to as my co-researchers) based in the region – namely, students at the University of Rojava enrolled in the module ‘Space, Place, Gender, Struggle’ – to explore the spaces of labour and the labour of spaces in the AANES. I combine solidarity pedagogy and auto-image-elicitation methods involving photography, body-mapping, film and cartography, to develop dialogic visual interpretation methods, in order to gather data pertaining to the spatial politics of struggle, and comes to organise this data Spatial Labour and the Politics of Place in Rojava around three key themes: hospitality, ceremony, and cultivation. In the process, it demonstrates the importance and the nuance of sociospatial thinking in the AANES, the connection between reproductive labour and spatial practice, and the potential that solidarity methodologies might have in the co-production of sociospatial knowledge.
Connotational Landscape of Spatial Labour
Ase’s Response to Fieldwork Exercise 2:
Space and Meaning
Plan View, Jinwar Women’s Village
Documentation of Diasporic Welatparezî
Conceptual Constellation for Ceremony Chapter
Afran’s response to Fieldwork Exercise 3: Space and LabourMapping of the LIberation of Kobane
Martyr Shrine, Rojava
Thumbnails of Line Quality Analysis across the Findings
Ba’athist Statue Destruction, Guerilla Statue Construction
Ceremony Constellation
Trial Run Mapping of Domestic Spatial Labour, Yiru Qian
Working Drawing over Bourdieu’s Plan of a pre- (and thus post-) revolutionary home, see more here To access any chapters in PDF form, please contact me by email.