Call for Papers

Urban Laborscapes: Ethnographic Encounters with Work, Innovation, and Survival in Tokyo

Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2025
Event: November 28-30, 2025
Location: Shibaura House, Tokyo https://shibaurahouse.jp/
Submissions for Zoom presentations will be considered but in principle, we are looking for a face-to-face event. 

The urban is not only a space of concrete and capital, but of constant labor--visible and invisible, paid and unpaid, precarious and persistent. From small factories in Tokyo's Shitamachi to algorithm-driven gig work, urban labor today is at once shaped by historical legacies and reconfigured by technological, demographic, and spatial change. In Japan's post-bubble economy, these dynamics are especially acute: stable employment has eroded, "irregular" labor is the norm, and migrants have entered labor markets long resistant to their presence. How do these shifts shape the ways people work, innovate, and survive in the city? And how can multidisciplinary ethnography help us trace these transformations across scales--bodily, architectural, infrastructural, and institutional?

This conference invites papers grounded in ethnographic research that explore the entanglements of labor and urban form and life. While the event will feature presentations focused on Tokyo's small-scale industry and everyday work environments, we will also have panels that engage broadly with urban labor in Tokyo within the context of Japan, Asia and beyond. We welcome innovative proposals based on theoretically informed empirical, ethnographic work from anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, economists, architects, and researchers from related approaches.

Themes might include, but are not limited to:

1. Spatialization of Labor
   Labor embedded in public and private urban space; invisible or undervalued occupations; classed and gendered access to the city through work.
2. Informality, Precarity, and the Post-Industrial
   Non-standard labor arrangements, gig work, informal economies, and the reconfiguration of labor after industrial decline.
3. Gendered and Reproductive Labor in the City
   Unpaid or underpaid care work, feminized labor economies, and the infrastructures that support or suppress reproductive labor.
4. Labor Memory and Urban Change
   The erasure or memorialization of working-class histories; industrial nostalgia; oral history and ethnographic archiving.
5. Migration, Mobility, and Urban Labor Markets
   Migrant and refugee labor, multilingual workplaces, legal precarity, and the social geographies of mobile workforces.
6. Labor as Urban World-Making
   Work routines as practices of city-making; the shaping of urban time, space, and identity through occupational life.

Submission Guidelines
Please submit:

• Title and abstract of approximately 200 words
• Your name, affiliation and a short bio of approximately 200 words

Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2025
Presentations may be in English or Japanese.

The conference will take place at Shibaura House, a beautiful, open-design venue located in the heart of Tokyo. Learn more: https://shibaurahouse.jp/

For questions, please contact:
To submit your proposal or questions to David Slater: dhslater@gmail.com

Organizers:

Christian Dimmer, Waseda University
Keigo Kobayashi, Waseda University
Vincent Mirza, University of Ottawa
David Slater, Sophia University