Space, Loss and Resistance: A Haunted Pool-Map in South-Eastern Turkey

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-469
Author(s):  
Umut Yıldırım
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Eastern Turkey ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
Neoliberal Restructuring ◽  
A Site ◽  
Anthropological Literature

Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2005 to February 2007, and March and August 2008) in Diyarbakır, southeastern Turkey, this article explores the conceptual intersection of recent anthropological literature on space, neoliberalism and resistance to study the affective life of politics in the context of the war between the Partiye Karkêren Kurdistan and the Turkish State in the 1990s. Offering a contribution to regional studies on the neoliberal restructuring of the urban space and to the anthropology of resistance, this article seeks to make ‘the political’ into a conceptual thread. The article deploys this approach to think through dissonant affects at a site where uncountable deaths are woven into the neoliberal restructuring of space, yet denied through the form that such governance takes.

scholarly journals The Conflictual (Trans)formation of the Public Sphere in Urban Space: The Case of Diyarbakır

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 43-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeynep Gambetti
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Kurdistan Workers Party ◽  
A Site

“In the East, understanding is a surreptitious shroud.”Kemal Varol“Men come into existence through their struggles”This study aims to contribute to efforts to understand how redress occurs in local contexts impaired by armed conflict. Its particular focus is on events, dynamics and forms of relationality that (re)create public spheres on a local level. It takes the city of Diyarbakır, the largest in Southeastern Turkey, as the vantage point from which to explore the transformation of a site of violent conflict into a space for the expression of differences that were either nonexistent or suppressed. Since the beginning of the armed uprising of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in 1984, the majority of political actors in Diyarbakır have in effect been polarized into two antagonistic camps (the Turkish state vs. the PKK). With the end of armed conflict five years ago, Diyarbakır has been astoundingly transformed into a paradise for civil society activists. The dynamics through which new urban spaces of existence and of expression have been created have not ceased being conflictual. In exploring the formative function of micro and macro struggles on publicness, the theoretical intent of this study is to argue against the Habermasian conceptualization of the public sphere.

How does the political enter the newsroom? The representation of the Kurdish ‘Other’ in Turkish journalism

Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110156
Author(s):  
Ozan Aşık
Keyword(s):  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
News Production ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
Political Differences ◽  
Journalistic Practice ◽  
Research Period ◽  
Turkish Society

In this article, I examine how journalists working for the Turkish national mainstream televisual media represent Kurds – a significant national ‘Other’ of Turkish society – in the process of news production. My research is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2011 and 2014 in the newsrooms of two Turkish television channels with different political outlooks and experiences. The study reveals an unprecedented interest of mainstream television media in the inclusionary representation of Kurds during the research period due to a temporary change to the traditional Turkish state policy toward Kurds. In this new political context, I argue that the journalistic practice and discourse on Kurds is likely to be determined by political differences among Turkish journalists. The Turkish journalists working for these two different channels, for example, seek to justify and advance conflicting political agendas since they have contradicting political worldviews and political experiences. Based on these findings, this article demonstrates how the three factors of political worldview, political experience, and political context combine to shape journalistic values – the values which orient various stages of news production, at which journalists imagine, categorize, and articulate the Kurds and decide how to represent them in news outputs.

Political participation in a Palestinian university: Nablus undergraduates’ political subjectivities through boredom, fear and consumption

Ethnography ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 518-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noemi Casati
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
University Students ◽  
Recent History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Political Approach ◽  
A Site

While Palestine is often approached either as a site of ‘resistance’ or of recent neoliberal de-politicization, the case of young university students defeats dichotomous categorizations and points to the more complex and layered nature of political subjectivities. Drawing on unique ethnographic fieldwork as a student at Najah University in Nablus, this article addresses students’ political subjectivities against the backdrop of three macrochanges in Palestinian recent history: the professionalization of politics, the tightening of internal repression, and the neoliberal economic turn. Overall, the study argues that, while Najah undergraduates maintain a strong nationalist discourse, they have come to conceptualize ‘politics’ as negative, at once ineffective and dangerous. Caught up in a web of conflicting social expectations, the pessimism vis-à-vis the political field leads them to abandon traditional sites of participation and to adopt a cynical yet ultimately political approach to consumption in an attempt to ‘change air’ and ‘just live’.

Book reviews

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-226
Author(s):  
Kurdish Studies
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Spatial Control ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
The 19Th Century

Andrea Fischer-Tahir and Sophie Wagenhofer (edsF), Disciplinary Spaces: Spatial Control, Forced Assimilation and Narratives of Progress since the 19th Century, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017, 300 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-8376-3487-7).Ayşegül Aydın and Cem Emrence, Zones of Rebellion: Kurdish Insurgents and the Turkish State, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015, 192 pp., (ISBN: 978-0-801-45354-0).Evgenia I. Vasil’eva, Yugo-Vostochniy Kurdistan v XVI-XIX vv. Istochnik po Istorii Kurdskikh Emiratov Ardelan i Baban. [South-Eastern Kurdistan in the XVI-XIXth cc. A Source for the Study of Kurdish Emirates of Ardalān and Bābān], St Petersburg: Nestor-Istoria, 2016. 176 pp., (ISBN 978-5-4469-0775-5).Karin Mlodoch, The Limits of Trauma Discourse: Women Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2014, 541 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-87997-719-2). 

Global Justice at the Municipal Scale

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fonna Forman ◽  
Teddy Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Global City ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Cities or municipalities are often the most immediate institutional facilitators of global justice. Thus, it is important for cosmopolitans and other theorists interested in global justice to consider the importance of the correspondence between global theories and local actions. In this chapter, the authors explore the role that municipalities can play in interpreting and executing principles of global justice. They offer a way of thinking about the cosmopolitan or global city not as a gentrified and commodified urban space, but as a site of local governance consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitan moral aims. They work to show some ways in which the city of Medellín, Colombia, has taken significant steps in that direction. The chapter focuses especially on how it did so and how it might serve as a model in some important ways for the transformation of other cities globally in a direction more consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitanism.

Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hem Borker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Marriage Education ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Media ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
A Site ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Educational Journeys ◽  
The Ideal

This ethnography provides a theoretically informed account of the educational journeys of students in girls’ madrasas in India. It focuses on the unfolding of young women’s lives as they journey from home to madrasa and beyond. Using a series of ethnographic portraits and bringing together the analytical concepts of community, piety, and aspiration, it highlights the fluidity of the essences of the ideal pious Muslim woman. It illustrates how the madrasa becomes a site where the ideals of Islamic womanhood are negotiated in everyday life. At one level, girls value and adopt practices taught in the madrasa as essential to the practice of piety (amal). At another level, there is a more tactical aspect to cultivating one’s identity as a madrasa-educated Muslim girl. The girls invoke the virtues of safety, modesty, and piety learnt in the madrasa to reconfigure conventional social expectations around marriage, education, and employment. This becomes more apparent in the choices exercised by the girls after leaving the madrasa, highlighted in this book through narratives of madrasa alumni pursuing higher education at a central university in Delhi. The focus on journeys of girls over a period of time, in different contexts, complicates the idealized and coherent notions of piety presented by anthropological literature on women’s participation in Islamic piety projects. Further, the educational stories of girls challenge the media and public representations of madrasas in India, which tend to caricature them as outmoded religious institutions with little relevance to the educational needs of modernizing India. Mapping madrasa students’ personal journeys of becoming educated while leading pious lives allows us to see how these young women are reconfiguring notions of Islamic womanhood.

Space Making as Artistic Practice: The Relationship between Grassroots Art Organizations and the Political Economy of Urban Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Zilberstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Art Organizations ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The Relationship

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do–It–Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations. Through their engagements with cultural representations, space and time, grassroots artists represent and amplify the interests of marginal actors. By allying with residents, community organizations and other art spaces, grassroots artists form a social movement to redefine the goals and usages of urban space. My findings indicate that heterogeneous art networks exist and grassroots art networks can influence urban space in opposition to top–down development.

scholarly journals Europe and/or the UK: Post-Brexit urban and regional development futures – A special issue

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Nick Henry ◽  
Adrian Smith
Keyword(s):  
Regional Development ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Studies ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Epochal Change ◽  
Urban And Regional Development ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Political Economic

It was over 25 years ago that European Urban and Regional Studies was launched at a time of epochal change in the composition of the political, economic and social map of Europe. Brexit has been described as an epochal moment – and at such a moment, European Urban and Regional Studies felt it should offer the space for short commentaries on Brexit and its impact on the relationships of place, space and scale across the cultural, economic, social and political maps of the ‘new Europes’. Seeking contributions drawing on the theories, processes and patterns of urban and regional development, the following provides 10 contributions on Europe, the UK and/or their relational geographies in a post-Brexit world. What the drawn-out and highly contested process of Brexit has done for the populace, residents and ex-pats of the UK is to reveal the inordinate ways in which our mental, everyday and legal maps of the regions, nations and places of the UK in Europe are powerful, territorially and rationally inconsistent, downright quirky at times but also intensely unequal. First, as the UK exits the Single Market, the nature of the political imagination needed to create alternatives to the construction of new borders and new divisions, even within a discourse of creating a ‘global Britain’, remains uncertain. European Urban and Regional Studies has always been a journal dedicated to the importance of pan-European scholarly integration and solidarity and we hope that it will continue to intervene in debates over what alternative imaginings to a more closed and introverted future might look like. Second, as the impacts of COVID-19 continue to change in profound ways how we think, work and travel across European space, we will need to find new forms of integration and new forms of engagament in intellectual life and policy development. European Urban and Regional Studies remains commited to forging such forms.

scholarly journals Remittance Houses and Transnational Citizenship: Mapping Eritrea’s Diaspora–State Relationships

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Milena Belloni
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Transnational Citizenship ◽  
A Site

Can diaspora houses be used as a site to explore transnational citizenship? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Eritrea, this article shows that different kinds of remittance houses reify different categories of transnational citizens with various sets of rights and duties. Drawing on studies on state–diaspora relations and remittance houses, I illustrate the key role that housing plays in the Eritrean state’s efforts to build a loyal diaspora. By looking at housing projects (state-led and individual) over the last thirty years, the article shows how different groups of emigrants – based on their relationship to the state of origin as well as their status in their country of residence – have been more or less able to realise their aspirations to build a house back home. By doing this, I show the importance of considering remittance houses as not only transnational cultural artefacts but also political claims to membership.

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