Friday, November 1st, 2019 Precarious Workers in the Speculative City: Making Worker’s Power of Self-Employed Tenant Shopkeepers in Seoul through the Production of Space

Description

Within the labor literature, with its predominant focus on wage workers, self-employed workers are too often ignored and under-examined as part of the modern proletariat. However, this neglect of self-employed workers creates major blind spots in our understanding of the multiplicity of agents of social change that are organizing as workers outside the Global North. As urban spaces are increasingly being captured as a speculative commodity, especially in rapidly urbanizing cities beyond the often-theorized and studied West, urban spaces are becoming a source of precarity for the many self-employed workforce who depend on them to make a living. However, the same spaces are also emerging as loci for building workers’ power. I focus on the South Korean tenant shopkeepers who are waging creative collective actions to defend their rights to their shops and attracting outside allies within the progressive networks to join them. Through ethnographic research, I analyze how and when the making of what I refer to as protest space—a symbolic space challenging the entrenched power structure—can effectively translate into workers’ power. The case of Seoul presents broader implications for understanding how the previously fragmented and isolated self-employed workers can form collective consciousness.

Yewon Andrea Lee is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Prior to coming to Toronto, she completed her doctoral degree in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
As a political and labor sociologist and urban ethnographer, Yewon is broadly interested in how speculative real estate interests increasingly dictate the shapes and characters of urban landscapes and how, in response, ordinary people organize to preserve their ways of living. Her dissertation, Precarious Workers in the Speculative City: The Untold Gentrification Story of Tenant Shopkeepers’ Displacement and Resistance in Seoul, examines tenant shopkeepers in Seoul, Korea—how the previously unorganized organize under their collective identity as workers. A manuscript that emerged from this dissertation is currently forthcoming at Critical Sociology and has received many awards including Honorable Mention in the 2019 American Sociological Association’s Mayer N. Zald Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship/ Graduate Student Paper Award competition.