New geographies of work and labour within, across and around collaborative workspaces

Abstract der Sitzung

Collaborative workspaces (hereafter CWS) (e.g., coworking spaces, fablabs, open labs, hubs, or makerspaces) are physical spaces of work, in which workers share (im)material infrastructure and resources. These spaces of flexible work transform our understanding of labour, placing work into new spatial arrangements often enacted through practices of sharing between spheres of paid and unpaid work. Besides new spaces for work, we observe that workers combine different locations for work, such as homes, offices, cafés, libraries, CWS. Collaborative work and labour are thus organised in a multi-local manner.

In our session we combine understandings on labour practices from the cultural and creative economy focussing on precariousness and connect them with social practices and cultures of sharing, and provisioning. Through sharing, manifold forms of work not necessarily productive of economic value become visible. Here, CWS spatialise paradoxes and tensions: On the one hand, CWS show which resources are necessary between paid and unpaid forms of work to maintain the CWS itself as a place of work. On the other hand, CWS pose questions about (new) divisions of labour: how is boundaryless work distributed and (sub)divided in the realms of labour and work, when work is increasingly liquefying into almost all everyday spheres?

To shed light on these questions, we welcome perspectives on work and labour within, across and around collaborative workspaces adopting the lenses of labour, feminist, and digital geographies, as well as a focus on practices of sharing. The purpose of this session is to demonstrate how workers proactively shape economic geographies through collaborative work such as coworking, co-creating, co-making, co-living, and the like. Contributions about all forms of work carried out within CWS are welcome, may it be productive and reproductive (e.g., labouring practices, emotional support, paid/unpaid work, curation), as well as forms of work carried out around CWS, necessary for their spatial reproduction (e.g., care work carried out by family members allowing coworkers to deal with work within CWS). Moreover, we encourage contributors exploring logics and boundaries of sharing within/around collaborative work practices, ways in which coworkers deal with new divisions of labour, professional maturation, precarious living and (im)mobile working conditions.

We welcome conceptual and theory-driven contributions which explore:

●The role of CWS in professional trajectories of their users,

●Forms of paid and unpaid work reproducing the workers and the CWS (both in and outside as well as across the spaces),

●Forms of collaboration inside the spaces and between the spaces and other local actors,

●The limitations and potentials of sharing and (non‑)reciprocal exchange,

●Multilocalities of collaborative work,

●New divisions of labour through sharing,

●Other contributions around fluid labour and its spatial implications are welcome too.