Social classes are fading away. They are fading away as forms of identity with which groups associate themselves; they are fading away as anchors of social movements; and they are fading away as objects of study from social scientists' agenda. This was the shared opinion of one of our Editorial Board meetings in 2009. Not having much power to intervene on the first two accounts, we decided that we still could do something about bringing social class back onto the agenda of social scientists. We could organize a conference and invite scholars to share their work on social classes or to rethink their work through the prism of social class. Hence a conference entitled “Urban Classes and Politics in the Neoliberal Era: Turkey in Comparison” was held in October 2010. The objective was to instigate a scholarly debate on social classes in urban Turkey, in comparison to other regions such as South Asia and Latin America.
