Geographical knowledge Production in a world of crisis: Reviving workers' inquiry and renewing labour geography

Slot 1 · Fri 27 Nov · 18:30–20:00

1. 1.“Together for life” ? Acts of hindrance in contemporary workers’ struggles: a labour geography perspective

   Μyrto Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, Kostas Gourzis, Stelios Gialis

   • University of the Aegean
   Abstract

   Amid ongoing economic restructuring, increased labour precarity, and the erosion of social and labour rights, it is necessary to analyse the role of spatially-informed labour agency and the spatiality of contemporary workers’ struggles. Workers are often studied from the perspective of capital, which overlooks the agency labour possesses to shape its politico-economic landscape. This work places workers and their struggles at the centre to analyse their agency as they shape the economic geography of countries with semi-advanced capitalism, specifically Greece. We focus on the 2022 labour struggle of Malamatina’s workers (Thessaloniki, Greece) and examine how they attempted to produce spatial fixes both in collaboration with and in opposition to capital, the state, unions, and local, national, and international actors in solidarity. We employ a mixed-method research design, combining primary and secondary qualitative and quantitative data with mapping techniques. Our research on labour actions and strategies through workers’ inquiry contributes to scientific debate and enhances understanding of the conditions under which labour may produce specific landscapes that serve workers’ interests, and the role negative forms of labour agency – termed acts of hindrance – may play in constraining successful struggles.

2. 2.Racial Capitalism and the Multiplication of Labour: Towards Migrant Workers’ Inquiry

   Sol Ballet

   • Ghent University
   Abstract

   This contribution contends that if labour is central for organising and struggling, then workers’ inquiry that wants to intervene in the politics of knowledge must grapple with how conditions of racial capitalism intersect with the multiplication of labour. First, it takes the starting point of precarious migrant labour in urban contexts in European welfare states as a possibility to bring analytical refining to the much-contested relationship between race and capitalism. I will probe into Black Marxist debates that argue that race helps to ‘reproduce labour’ in an ‘internally divided form’, and thus create sections of the working class which might be subject to greater forms of exploitation and to forestall ‘the unity of the [working] class as a whole’ (Hall et al., 1978: 346). By connecting these predominantly North-American debates to that of the ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013) of precarious migrant workers in European cities, I aim to analyse how the multiplication of labour (incl. new labour regimes) produce diverse subject positions. Second, if class is a social relation forged through struggle, then we must pay attention to how the multiplication and racialised division of labour can give rise to multiple struggles. In this sense, I tackle how precarious migrant workers’ inquiry can reveal how labour unions have long occupied a paradoxical position within Marxist theory, both essential for working-class formation, but also part of corporatist state apparatuses which reproduce classed, raced, and gendered orders of capital-labour relations. Hence, finally, I argue that if we truly want to grasp how precarious migrants inhabit and organise around the racialised exploitation of their labour in urban contexts, we need to adopt an infrastructural lens.

3. 3.Critical monitoring: A workers’ inquiry into socio-legal workers’ casefiles in support of an anti-displacement agenda in Brussels

   Mae de Monchy

   • Cosmopolis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
   Abstract

   This paper examines housing precarity in Brussels through a workers’ inquiry into socio-legal case files, situating frontline social workers within broader transformations in welfare and housing regimes. In a context marked by austerity, political fragmentation, and the erosion of welfare infrastructures—exemplified by prolonged governmental deadlock in the Brussels Region—households face intensifying legal and material insecurity. These dynamics are mirrored in the working conditions of social and legal professionals tasked with safeguarding the right to housing within a fragmented policy landscape. The contribution draws on an action research collaboration with Bonnevie, a regionally subsidised housing aid organisation in Old Molenbeek-Saint-Jean. It mobilises social workers’ case files as situated data, demonstrating how such institutional archives can compensate for the lack of systematic eviction data while offering a grounded entry point to conceptualise displacement. Methodologically, the study combines quantitative classification of eviction types and causes with qualitative analysis of case files and working conditions, informed by institutional ethnography. This approach foregrounds how “texts”—case files, legal documents, and administrative procedures—mediate ruling relations and shape housing trajectories. Positioning this inquiry within a broader network of socio-legal actors, including engaged lawyers, the paper conceptualises social workers as frontline agents navigating and extending institutional mandates. Drawing on a Marxist-feminist understanding of work, it highlights how these actors exceed formal job descriptions to contest processes of socio-legal precarisation. Empirical material includes interviews, workshop recordings, and field notes, capturing both the negotiation of legal frameworks and emergent strategies of resistance. By centring eviction and displacement, the paper advances the notion of “critical monitoring” as a method of knowledge production. It argues for displacement-based eviction monitoring grounded in frontline perspectives, contributing to anti-displacement struggles while critically interrogating the institutional production of precarity.

4. 4.Precarity and Dual Power: The Political Composition of Ireland’s Working Class

   Jack Edmunds-Bergin

   • Maynooth University, Ireland
   Abstract

   This paper presents ongoing PhD research examining how migrant and non-migrant communities navigate precarity through informal care infrastructures in two Irish localities, Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart and Letterkenny. Drawing on Census analysis and preliminary fieldwork, the research investigates how state withdrawal from housing, healthcare, and social services, combined with rising living costs, produces distinct geographies of vulnerability. These conditions generate restless temporalities: prolonged waiting for social housing, accelerated evictions, and the relentless circulation of marginalised populations through temporary accommodations. These arrangements are actively produced through deregulated housing markets, austerity, and welfare conditionality, while anti-migrant discourse blames racialised communities for scarcity. Insisting on labour's continued centrality, I carry out social investigation in and beyond workplace organising to reconceptualise care as socially reproductive labour through which class composition and its political capacities are forged. This is compounded with my own militant research interests as being involved in tenant and trade union organising. Within these conditions, care emerges as contested practice. Initial fieldwork identifies "shadow care infrastructures" of community gardens, language exchanges, tenant organising through which communities build collective capacity. In Blanchardstown, engagement revealed cross-community work to claw back public services. In Letterkenny, residents' associations unified Irish and non-Irish tenants against evictions and far-right mobilisation. Methodologically, the research develops a two-phase "care-tography" as a contribution to workers' inquiry. Phase 1 maps structural conditions "from above" through demographic analysis, positioning the researcher's local subjectivity within capitalist relations. Phase 2 employs spatial ethnography: participatory mapping, focus groups, interviews documenting how communities collectively respond, treating knowledge production as a weapon of organising. By tracing care labour's uneven distribution and transformation through collective power, this paper posits that care operates beyond reproductive labour, instead as a political means. The inquiry orients toward communties’ capacities to act upon shared findings, seeking to turn experiential knowledge into a weapon for collective resistance.

5. 5.Conflict as method: tenants’ organising and the making of a housing subject in Greece

   Theodoros Karyotis

   • Ghent University / Aristotle University
   Abstract

   This contribution departs from a practical and theoretical paradox encountered in organising tenants in Greece: a severe housing crisis does not automatically produce a housing movement. In a context shaped by the hegemony of small property, housing insecurity is still often experienced as private failure, temporary misfortune or individual maladjustment, rather than as a shared political condition. Organising, therefore, does not simply aggregate pre-existing identities. It contributes to the formation of a collective subject capable of naming its position, identifying its adversaries and acting upon the relations that produce insecurity. When the home, the neighbourhood and the public square become fields of exploitation and struggle, workers’ inquiry can be transposed from the workplace to the terrain of rent, debt and social reproduction. The landlord–tenant conflict is not merely a political dispute, but a method for producing knowledge. Rent disputes, eviction threats, negotiations, heated public exchanges, but also internal organisational tensions and disagreements, do not merely provide empirical material. They make visible the moral, legal and economic architecture of the Greek housing property regime. They uncover actors, logics, alliances, patterns. They reveal how property common sense operates, how tenants are individualised and moralised, and where this hegemony begins to fracture. Research can thus move beyond detached observation and become a situated, conflictual process embedded in organising. Assemblies, mutual aid, public discourse and strategic reflection become sites where experience is collectivised, concepts are tested and revised and dispersed grievances are translated into shared claims. Nevertheless, the process remains incomplete. The analytical framework must be disconnected from the researcher/organiser and enter a collective cycle of analysis, planning, action, evaluation and reflection. Such tenants’ inquiry blurs the lines between methodology and politics. It produces knowledge on property relations, while contributing to the construction of a housing subject beyond the property imperative.

6. 6.Tenants’ Inquiry: Knowledge production and class recomposition under rentier capitalism

   Nikolaos Vrantsis

   • Institute for Housing and Urban Research
   Abstract

   The ongoing reconfiguration of capitalism, marked by the growing centrality of rent extraction and housing assetization, demands a reorientation of inquiry itself. As accumulation shifts from production toward rents and finance, new terrains of struggle emerge. Labor remains central, but must now be traced across the fragmented relations that bind tenants, debtors, and urban populations to circuits of capital. This contribution argues for the development of tenants’ inquiry as a contemporary extension of workers’ inquiry. Emerging from operaismo and militant research, workers’ inquiry was a political wager that knowledge production can aid class recomposition, and that research must be embedded within collective struggle. Today, this wager must be reactivated under conditions where exploitation is increasingly organised through rent, credit, and asset-based accumulation. Such a shift requires a rupture with the self-referential tendencies of academic research. Rather than producing knowledge for institutional circulation, inquiry must become a situated practice that strengthens movements and contributes to collective capacities for action. This entails moving from studying housing struggles to producing knowledge with tenants as political subjects. Grounded in work with the Thessaloniki Tenants’ Union and the European Action Coalition, this paper points to emerging infrastructures of tenants’ inquiry from collective mapping of rents and evictions to shared analysis of legal and financial mechanisms and the circulation of knowledge across struggles. At stake is the possibility of transforming dispersed experiences of dispossession into coordinated practices of resistance.