Moving images, moving lives: documentary in Mobility Studies w/ Eda Beyazit

Drawing our series on Creative Methods in Transport Studies to a close Eda speaks about her experience making the documentary film Servis based on her research with domestic workers in Istanbul. A link to watch the documentary will be distributed to participants prior to the seminar. This will be a hybrid event - please feel free to join us either in person or online. To introduce to seminar Eda writes:

And Action! Moving Pictures, Moving Lives: Documentary as Method in Mobility Studies

This seminar reflects on the making of Servis: Commoning Commutes, a research-based documentary examining gendered and precarious mobilities through the everyday commuting practices of domestic workers in Istanbul. Centring on Gül’s journeys from the urban periphery to gated residential areas, the film documents how domestic workers collectively organised an informal minibus (servis) during the COVID-19 pandemic in response to diminished public transport services. The documentary builds on the accompanying paper, Precarious Mobilities, extending its analysis through an audio-visual approach attentive to lived experience.

Methodologically, the film treats documentary as a form of inquiry into everyday mobility, approaching it as something embedded in daily life rather than explicitly articulated. Filming in homes, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and shared journeys highlights repetition, waiting, fatigue, and care as central yet often neglected dimensions of transport. The camera crew works around Gül’s work schedules, family commitments, and health appointments, submitting to the rhythms and constraints of her everyday life. By positioning Gül as the epistemic centre of the film, the documentary prioritises her narratives and interpretations throughout.

The seminar explores documentary filmmaking as a creative, policy-oriented approach to transport research, not by offering solutions, but by communicating experiential knowledge, expanding what counts as transport knowledge and how mobility injustice is understood.