New Spaces
New Resistances
New Solidarities

Invitation

LAB-OR invites scholars, researchers, artists, and practitioners to submit extended abstracts for a proposed special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies. This open call is the first stage in developing a formal special issue proposal. Selected contributors will be invited to join the proposal-development process.

Aims and Scope

How are the spaces of everyday life in contemporary Türkiye being remade by platformisation, urban transformation, displacement, economic precarity, environmental crisis, and expanding regimes of surveillance? What forms of resistance and solidarity emerge within these transformations, and where might they reproduce existing inequalities or generate new exclusions?

The proposed special issue approaches space not as a neutral container but as a relational and contested process produced through infrastructures, media, bodies, affects, representations, and everyday practices. Drawing on cultural studies and critical approaches to everyday life, it invites contributors to examine how material, digital, sonic, affective, embodied, and imagined spaces redistribute visibility, voice, mobility, risk, care, and belonging.

Rather than treating resistance and solidarity as self-evidently emancipatory, the issue asks how they are organised, mediated, sustained, constrained, commercialised, or co-opted. It is interested in the shifting boundaries between resistance, refusal, endurance, survival, accommodation, and complicity, as well as in the unequal conditions under which collective action becomes possible.

Central Questions

• How are physical, digital, sonic, embodied, and affective spaces created and contested through everyday cultural practices?
• When does an ordinary practice become legible as resistance, and how do survival, adaptation, refusal, and dissent overlap?
• How are solidarities built and sustained across differences of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, religion, disability, generation, citizenship, and location?
• Who is included in or excluded from emerging networks of solidarity, and how are their resources, risks, and visibility distributed?
• How do platforms, media infrastructures, images, sounds, memories, and bodies shape public space and counter-public formation?
• How do spatial politics in Türkiye connect with diasporic, regional, and global circuits of people, capital, media, and political imagination?

Possible Themes

Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following interconnected areas:

Approaches and Methods

The issue welcomes theoretically grounded empirical and conceptual work using qualitative, ethnographic, visual, sonic, digital, historical, participatory, comparative, and practice-based methods. Contributors are encouraged to reflect on positionality, research ethics, translation, access, and the politics of representation, particularly when working with vulnerable communities or politically sensitive material.

Submission Requirements

Please submit one document in English containing:

• A working article title.
• An extended abstract of 500 to 700 words stating the research question, central or anticipated argument, theoretical framework, methodology and materials, contribution to cultural studies, and relevance to the proposed special issue.
• Five keywords.
• A short biography of up to 150 words for each author, including name, position, institutional affiliation, and email address.
• The name and full contact details of the corresponding author for co-authored proposals.

Submission format: Word or PDF. Name the file SURNAME_NewSpaces_2026 and use the email subject Proposed Special Issue New Spaces. Send submissions and enquiries to burcu.dabak@yasar.edu.tr.

Selection and Publication Process

Extended abstracts will be assessed for conceptual clarity, originality, methodological rigour, relevance to the issue, and their potential contribution to a coherent and diverse collection.

Selected authors will be invited to develop their abstracts with the guest editors. The resulting collection will be submitted to the European Journal of Cultural Studies as a formal special issue proposal.

Subject to the journal's approval and agreed schedule, full research articles are expected to be approximately 7,000 to 8,000 words. All manuscripts will undergo the journal's independent double-anonymised peer-review process. Final publication decisions remain with the journal editors. Authors will be responsible for obtaining any necessary ethical approvals, participant consent, and copyright permissions.

Indicative Timeline

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