M.A. Theses
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Item A comparison of civic orientation and identities : Bosnian and Bosniak muslims(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2023., 2023) Altuncu Kaan, Safa Nur.; Korhonen, Juho.; Taraktaş, Başak.The present study addresses the contested dichotomy between ethnic and civic nationalism, a widely debated issue in sociological literature. Specifically, the study engages with literature that challenges the existence of this dichotomy, focusing on the case study of Muslims living in Bosnia- Herzegovina. The Bosnian national identity is regarded as a civic identity that encompasses diverse social groups, while the Bosniak identity is one of the most significant ethnic identities, alongside Serbs and Croats. To investigate this topic, the study employs a secondary data set collected by IPSOS on the nation-making process of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Using binary logistic regression models, the study demonstrates the impact of different ethnic identities and tendencies towards civic engagement on the significance placed on civic identity. In the subsequent stage, the study employs SPSS two-step clustering to identify latent subgroupings within the categorical ethnic or civic identities presented in the literature. The findings indicate that Bosniaks and Bosnians have similar tendencies to prioritize their citizenship identity over their ethnic identity when compared to other ethnic identities in the region. Additionally, the study uncovers examples of subgroups within the Bosniak and Bosnian groups, thereby questioning the validity of categorizing national identities in terms of the ethnic-civic dichotomy.Item Rethinking the local : Adana Kebab and artisanship at the intersection of geography and history(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2023., 2023) Birbiri, Elif.; Yenal, Zafer.This thesis focuses on the ‘sense of belonging’ evoked by regional and local cuisines, through the Adana kebab. It explores how ‘local’ cuisines are formed and how they find their place in national cuisines. The thesis is structured around two key foci, namely, the artisanship of the Adana kebab and the process of the standardization of the dish. The first part considers the theoretical framework of the project and offers an alternative perspective on the concept of ‘space’. In addition, it introduces the physical and human geography of the region, its history, and the regional cuisine of Adana. Next, the thesis considers the findings from fieldwork, based primarily upon 28 semistructured interviews conducted with kebab artisans. The fieldwork addresses the dynamics of the regional cuisine around the kebab, in terms of the artisans' experience of craftsmanship, the making of the dish itself- including the ingredients and the equipment involved- and the culture around eating. After engaging with production practices, the thesis takes up a comparative analysis of the consumption patterns of the Adana kebab, both in Adana and Istanbul. Furthermore, the ensuing discussion of the ‘dining out’ culture enables an understanding of the effects of globalization, transformation and standardization of consumption and production practices. The thesis concludes that the experience and understanding of a regional cuisine, and the culture around it, cannot be reduced simply to its taste and smell. On the contrary, it should also involve a consideration of the communal socio-historical memory and cultural sensibilities of the region’s inhabitants.Item Shouldering the burden : water conservation campaigns and the question of responsibility(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2023., 2023) Bütüner, Gizem.; Yenal, Zafer.This thesis tackles the questions of what water is and why water conservation campaigns blame individual actions for water scarcity while agricultural and industrial uses of water are much more than household use. The two questions are approached through a critical discourse analysis of the existing literature on water and Finish’s water footprint campaign called Yarının Suyu. The first part explores the changing meanings of water in society, politics, economics, and the environment, arguing that water is an abstract hybrid with an intrinsic value as the subject in its encounters with others rather than a mere object as a resource or commodity. After establishing various meanings of water to different sets of people, the thesis uncovers why individuals are accused in water footprint campaigns, arguing that such campaigns regard water as a commodity to be profited from in contrast to their claims of water as a right to protect. Engaging with these two broad themes, this thesis criticizes an anthropocentric approach and the binary of nature/culture, arguing that water and society are internally related, transforming and being transformed in their relations. As such, it traces the global water crisis back to humanity, which can only be resolved by people changing their mindsets regarding water from a resourcist one to acknowledging its intrinsic value. The thesis concludes that only if we can change how we value water by not putting the responsibility on individuals and by making production and supply more sustainable, can we solve the water crisis.Item How does intervention by authority figures affect polarization in the Turkish twittersphere?(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2023., 2023) Togay, Özgür.; Erensü, Sinan.; Taraktaş, Başak.The thesis study examines the impact of statements made by authority figures on political polarization observed in the Turkish Twittersphere, focusing on the divisive conversations over Turkey’s exit from the Istanbul Convention and sexual orientation of the star volleyball player Ebrar Karakurt. It draws from the most recent advances in the field of computational social science to conduct a novel study of political polarization through big data. In addition to proposing a methodological framework on how to study polarization on social media using innovative approaches, the findings of this study provide insights into the degree of polarization within the Turkish Twittersphere and illustrate how Twitter users react to messaging by authority figures.Item Women laboring in home-based and cooperative work in Nurtepe(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2023., 2023) Sarıkaya, Zeynep Sıla.; Özselçuk, Ceren.This thesis research aims to depict a non-essentialist and non- reductionist representation of the articulation of home-based work with women’s unpaid domestic labor within the household. It is a case study based on the in-depth interviews conducted with the members of a women’s cooperative, who perform various kinds of labor and occupy multiple class and non-class positions both within and outside their households. The thesis provides a diverse economies framework for social analysis of the interviewees’ households and the cooperative, by exploring the multiple class and non-class processes overdetermining these social sites.Item Entanglement of labor and environment in an emerging nuclear power landscape : the Akkuyu NPP(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2023., 2023) Öztürk, Ekin.; Erensü, Sinan.The Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in the city of Mersin in Turkey marks a turning point for the country’s historical nuclear ambitions. Laden with promises of development, catching up with the developed world, and achieving welfare; the Akkuyu NPP holds immense symbolic power in the national imaginary. As an infrastructure megaproject; the Akkuyu NPP has been challenged by environmental mobilization at different conjunctures. However, these patterns of resistance are shaped and constrained by socioeconomic and political conditions at each historical stage. This study looks at these conditions as areas of conflict for environmental mobilization; and in this respect, investigates the impact of uneven distribution of costs and benefits, question of labor and employment, and discursive legitimization. It considers the way in which the Akkuyu NPP persisted and acquired popular consent for its existence, in order to seek answers to the broader question of linking environmental struggles with social injustice.Item What is left for 2000s : student opposition in Turkey between governmental repression and internal dilemmas(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2023., 2023) Yaraşır, Dağlar.; Erensü, Sinan.This master’s thesis aims to create an academic resource by focusing on the recent past of the student movement in Turkey, specifically addressing the 2000s that has been a neglected period in the existing literature on student movements. The study seeks to answer why the student movement failed to gain momentum throughout the 2000s. In this context, the research emphasizes the impact of changing and diversifying tools of repression (macro-sociological elements) as well as the internal tensions and dilemmas within the movement on the course of struggles during the 2000s.Item Village close enough : a study of the changing character of rural space in Turkey(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2022., 2022) Taşyürek, Elif Hatice.; Özselçuk, Ceren.This thesis aims to investigate movements occurring at a close distance between rural and urban areas and the changing character of the rural space in Turkey. Within the scope of the ethnographic field research I conducted in three villages of Çubuk District of Ankara, I interviewed people who migrated from the village to the city with various motivations and have continued to commute between the village and the city in changing routines and manners, people who returned to their village permanently and people who never left their village. Focusing on participants’ narratives, I examine forms of movements between the village and the city, the effects of these forms on the relationship between the rural and the urban, and suggest that movements between the village and other places have become a constituent of the rural space in Turkey. Based on the participants’ experience of the village, I argue that the village as a place contains conflicting aspects. I discuss the intricacy of memory, landscape, and work as the dimensions of the spatial reorganization of the rural space and argue that the balance between work and non work has shifted to the extent that the village has become a space to enjoy, among other things. Lastly, through the material and the verbal culture of the village and conflict- ridden commensal relations, I discuss how the idea of familial and communal attachments are dissolving is tied with how the village is remembered and its future is feared.Item Educational strategies of the conservative bourgeoisie: Cultural capital, family and schooling(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Anbar, Ahenk.; Candan, Ayfer Bartu.Over the past decades, the rise of the conservative bourgeoisie has been discussed in many aspects; however, the relation between such upward social mobility and education has not been problematized. This study is concerned with the conservative bourgeois families’ cultural capital formation process and the educational strategies being developed in this respect. The findings of the study are based on a field work composed of twelve semi-structured interviews and participant observation. Plus, to observe these emerging groups’ impact on the private education sector, the websites of private schools in Istanbul has been browsed and schools with a conservative identity have been identified. Within this scope, it can be said that AKP has pursued a neo-conservative educational policy in recent years by articulating neoliberal values such as competition, competence and creativity with religious and national ones. Secondly, it is seen that the number of conservative private schools has increased since the second half of 1990s, many of them having affiliations with conservative investment groups, associations and foundations. Thirdly, a significant intergenerational difference has been observed regarding families’ engagement with the cultural capital in terms of their rising educational levels and increasing involvement in their children’s educational life. This transformation of parenting, or more precisely mothering, can be accepted as an important basis on which the interviewees construct their subjectivities as “good mothers”. Finally, it is examined that aesthetics and religion-based morality are two main grounds through which families distinguish themselves both from lower class conservative families and from the secular bourgeoisie.Item Post-fordist affects, times and images: An ethnography of circulation in a digital advertising agency in Istanbul(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Atıcı, Selim Gökçe.; Sirman, Nükhet, 1953-.This thesis follows the making and unmaking of commodity images, boundaries of embodied selves and emotional investments to work: cultivations regarding desiring and laboring, in relation to spatial-temporal dynamics between humans, things and affects. The discussion is set up against the backdrop of faster rates of commodity circulation, blurring boundaries between work and leisure and labor and play, and the augmentation (pervasiveness) of software, tools and possibilities of digital communication. It draws on my participant observation as a 'digital strategist' in a digital advertising company in Istanbul for four months. The Introduction defines several tensions that run throughout the thesis, which makes it more conceptual. In Chapter 2, I situate my ethnographic work in wider discussions on commodity fetishism and branding, attending to the practices of interpolation, tabulation and calculation as they reflect the making of novelty and fantasies of an automated society. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the temporal self-understandings of digital media workers, and their relation to the workplace and the infrastructures of digital work. The final chapter plays with a working definition of 'genuineness' as an ambivalent affect that maps workplace authenticities and positions for self-fashioning in the workplace. The aim of this thesis is to situate digital/behavioral advertising work in a broader scale of global capitalism, informational networks, economic rationalities and space-time conundrums by engaging in dialogues with temporal self-understandings, affects and emotions, memory and anticipation, abstraction and embodiment, space and place, production and reproduction, and the ways in which working selves configure power relations.Item Unmaking and remaking everyday life in Diyarbakır: free schools as a decolonizing practice(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Dölek, Hazal Ilgaz.; Dubuisson, Eva-Marie.This thesis is grounded on my fieldwork in Diyarbakır carried out between October 2015 and April 2016. Considering the city as a space of colonial occupation, it examines the broad scale dynamics of the ongoing war as well as the unmakings and remakings of everyday life under siege. It traces the ethnographic sentiments and sensibilities of war and the intimate sites of power production and insurgency. In addition, it also focuses on the mother tongue-based education practices in one of the Free Schools. Free Schools provide a counter space where the already existing colonial ways of learning, knowing and being introduced by the Turkish education system can be decolonized. Therefore, I argue that the alternative philosophy of education they provide to struggle against the assimilationist, capitalist and patriarchal way of life is itself a decolonizing practice.Item Governing Turkey's internet: Cyber security as a strategy of power(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Zerin, Deniz.; Yenal, Zafer.This study investigates expansion of the field of cyber security in relation to governing of the Internet in Turkey within the last decade. It argues that security rationality is becoming the dominant diagrmn in evaluating problems and solutions associated with the Internet. It shows that cyber security is instrumental in expansion of forms of power associated with security objective through a discourse of risk and danger, institutional restructuring, law making, and most importantly, technical practices. Technical practices, for they have a indirect relation with the infrastructure of internet cmnmunications, represents a reflexive quality, which makes cyber security field eletnent of a distinct strategy of power, in the intersection of govermnent, technology and security.Item Shifting geographies of subversive politics in Istanbul(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Gül, Zeynel.; Üstündağ, Nazan.This thesis aims to understand the shifts in the spaces of radical left politics and the effects of these shifts on the discourses and modalities of political actions in Istanbul since the mid-1990s. In order to achieve this aim, it draws on an analysis of spatial distribution of political actions in central city sites and urban margins. It also focuses on the temporal mapping of critical events that shape political processes. It demonstrates that there exists a mobility of concentration of the political actions from urban margins to central spaces in the city. Based on records of radical left publications and ethnographic research in the left-stronghold Gazi and Okmeydanı neighborhoods, the thesis argues that the radical left employs different idioms and space-making practices, which in turn shape the modalities of their political actions. On the one side, the violent sacrificial practices by radical left subjects vis-à-vis the state contribute to the making of subversive neighborhood spaces – via walls, corners, parks, squares, barricades. On the other side, the human rights discourse based on victimhood converges with the spatial vector oriented to spaces of visibility in city centers. In the spaces of visibility, the material, economic, sensual and bodily dimensions of political actions are erased; the violently targeted body of the political subject is reduced to spectacle and voice. The thesis proposes to add action and visibility to the set of defining characteristics of space-complex, which is mostly discussed along the axis of materiality, memory, belonging and narrativity.Item The dilemma of amnesty politics in the AKP era: balancing the questions of legitimacy and instrumentality(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Yıldırım, İrem.; Kuyucu, Tuna.The Ankara Bar Association Human Rights Commission (Ankara Barosu İnsan Hakları Komisyonu) underlines that 158 amnesties in total, except for the 1999 Conditional Release Law, were legislated in Turkey before the AKP period, and 12 of these laws were general amnesties. Regarding the content of these laws, the Turkish state has tended to release the prisoners who commit petty crimes having a non-political character. However, the continuity in the use of amnesty mechanism in Turkey was broken at a certain historical moment: the beginning of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) era. For the first time, the ruling party has officially declared its disapproval of general amnesty, especially for crimes against individuals. This thesis aims to examine why general amnesty, as a long-term phenomenon in Turkey, has not been applied during the AKP period. Following the introductory Chapter One, Chapter Two looks into how three premises of neoliberal penality are used in the AKP era for an effective struggle against crime: punitiveness, responsibilization and managerialism. Chapter Three examines the ways in which the AKP government copes with the problems facing the judicial system of Turkey, i.e. high incarceration rates, and the high workload of the judiciary, without the amnesty option. Chapter Four explores the controversial debate on the legitimacy of amnesty by interrogating the AKP’s alternative moral stance on amnesty, whereas Chapter Five concludes the thesis. Briefly, this thesis develops insight into the AKP’s policy on amnesty circumscribed by both the questions of legitimacy and instrumentality, as well as by the dynamics of political conjuncture.Item The spatial imaginary and politics of democratic autonomy: a neighborhood assembly experience in Beyoğlu(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2015., 2015.) Bakar, Cansu.; Özselçuk, Ceren.This thesis studies Kurdish Movement’s Democratic Autonomy Project both in the ways that it is articulated in textual materials and materialized in the organizational forms of the movement, as well as in the manner in which it is undertaken and put into action in Hacıahmet neighborhood, Beyoğlu. I argue that the neighborhood assembly experiment/experience in a western city of Turkey differs from the ones in Kurdish cities particularly due to different relations with the space. Migration stories, longing for place of origin, relations with the city space, and attachments to the Kurdish community define the frames of local politics and bring about conflicting forms of engagements with the space. These conflicts lead the emergence of a space of struggle for both nation state and the Kurdish movement. I trace the implementations of the self-governmental project in Hacıahmet on the basis of daily encounters with the apparatuses of nation state. I also explore the shifts in discourse of the Kurdish Movement with a textual analysis. While the movement de-centralizes and transforms itself into a complex unity of organizations via horizontal interactions with other movements (left, gender, ecological, or geographically; Syria, Iran, Iraq) it also de-centralizes and localizes mode of politics with the inauguration of assemblies. The assembly proposes new forms of attachments with space, Kurdish community and also non-Kurdish communities by deconstructing existing centralized and vertical mode of doing politics and reconstructing new ones.Item A comparative study on the reputational trajectories of Turkish women intellectuals from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2015., 2015.) Şaşmaz, Hale.; Büyükokutan, Barış.How do woman intellectuals go beyond the sexism of intellectual field and achieve fame? To answer this question, this thesis examines the reputational trajectories of Turkish woman intellectuals from the late nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to the early Republican era through biographical and archival material. It focuses on five intellectual women who have been called the Great Women: Fatma Aliye, Emine Semiye, Nigar bint-i Osman, Halide Edib and Nezihe Muhiddin. Analysing women’s reputational trajectories in three periods -the Hamidian Era, the Second Constitutional Era and the Early Republican Era-, this study identifies four strategies the Great Women employed while negotiating patriarchal practices in intellectual milieus: collaboration, acquiescence, subversion and defiance. The findings show a) that strategy is indeed decisive in fighting patriarchy and what determines success is one’s resources and how she puts them into use and b) that the proper evaluation of changing resources in historical and political transitions is crucial both in making reputations and furthering them.Item Masculinities at night in the provinces(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2015., 2015.) Özarslan, Osman.; Yenal, Zafer.This thesis seeks to analyze the provincial nightlife and the relationalities that are attached to it. With this aim, firstly, I analyze the theme of ‘distance' that constitutes the province as a historical geography and an administrative unit, and the theme of ‘boredom' that constitutes the province as a sociological phenomenon. Based on these themes, I explain how the province, beyond a rural production unit and social relations surrounding it, is intertwined with the city. On the other hand, the province and its nightlife that promises a modern experience, leads to authentic masculinity experiences within its own social relations. The reproduction and continuity of masculinity is analyzed here in terms of nightlife typologies that each reproduce its own masculinity. At the same time, hostess women are regarded as major actors in nightlife in this study. I analyze the socioeconomic and sociocultural background that has led to their formation in nightlife through Turkey’s neoliberal transformation, and through the themes of indebtedness and poverty. The way hostesses try to survive in nightlife is analyzed in terms of passive resistance forms and their relations with the local community and the costumers. Hence, this study is about what constitutes the province rather than where it is constituted. It is about how nightlife relations are formed and to what kind of masculinities and femininities this leads to.Item Hilmi Ziya's life and thought from 1928 to 1960, in relation to the political and religious developments in the republic of Turkey(Thesis (M.A.)- Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Scieences, 1986., 1986.) Özberki, Ayşe R.; Mardin, Şerif,This is the study of Hilmi Ziya tllken's (1901-1974) thought in relation to the political and religious development in the Republic of Turkey. Hilmi Ziya Ulken is a representative example of the very first intellectuals of the young Turkish Nation. Much weight was given to his ideas about religion as religion is the core of the paradigma of his sociological views. On the other hand empasis was also given to men of ideas who have been influencial on Hilmi Ziya Ulken's thought or intellectual development. Finally the study exposes the continiuty of his ideas which changed in appearence only.Item Living waste: making a life in wasted spaces(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2015., 2015.) Kutlu, Yusuf.; Sirman, Nükhet,This thesis traces a case of how internally displaced Kurds make a life after being forced to migrate to the cities of western Turkey. The research was conducted with internally displaced Kurdish waste pickers living in the Tarlabaşı district of İstanbul and takes their working processes, their life practices, politics, intellectuality and aesthetics as a significant research framework. Since the aim is the making of a life in the informal space of Tarlabaşı, I examine how they produce space, time, and practices through their labor process, political practices, writings and intellectual, artistic and aesthetic products. My thesis argument is that the informal space of Tarlabaşı provides opportunities for internally displaced Kurds to make a life outside of modern state grounds, i.e. in a space of autonomy. Existing in this autonomous space produces practices of transgressing state power permanently for the purpose of making a life, despite intentionally emerged political aims and agendas that target state power. In so doing, life itself consists of perpetual practices of violating not only state power (by illegally obtaining its amenities), but also capitalist market relationships, modern urban life’s established normativity, and notions of regulated time and space in the city. Furthermore, I show how waste pickers apprehend and sense the world, and distinguish the common, structured and hegemonic way of the sensible. It is an attempt to find how internally displaced Kurdish waste pickers escape from the formal, the constituted, the normative and create a new way of living and being in the informal space.Item The show in the restaurant: performing affective labor through culinary fantasies in Istanbul(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2014., 2014.) Özdemir, Didem Derya.; Özselçuk, Ceren.In this thesis, I aim to make a contribution to the post-Fordist literature by exploring the neo-liberal transformation in the fine-dining sector in 2000s in Istanbul in order to rethink the concepts of immaterialization of labor and affective labor through Lacan. I psychoanalytically investigate the blurring of the boundary between work and enjoyment, a phenomenon explored in different terms in the post-Fordist literature, as immaterialization. Based on my ethnographic research in Istanbul, I offer a psychoanalytically informed analysis of this transformation, which refers to the blurring of the boundary between work and enjoyment. I suggest that this blurring emanates from the restructuring of the social imaginary with the fantasy of culinary work as art that constructs work as the primary object of desire. This research also investigates incorporation of a new architectural space called the show kitchen in the dining room, which provides the material conditions for cooks to perform their job as a form of art and identify with their representation as artists. To conclude, this thesis, which is in pursuit of enjoyment in the Lacanian sense of the term, claims that the key to understand both reproduction and displacement of post-Fordism is to conceptualize enjoyment as a dimension of affective labor as well as taking affective investments into consideration, as they are constitutive of the laborer subjectivity.