scholarly journals The Diminishing Agency of Urbanised Alevis Against the Rise of Political Islam in Turkey

Poligrafi ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 177-200
Author(s):  
Ozge Onay

This paper critically examines the diminishing agency of the first-urbanised Alevi generation vis- à-vis the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and their sectarian agenda mediated by political Islam. The conceptual position is underpinned by Foucault’s concept of governmentality and theory of agency in broader cultural terms. These theoretical frameworks interweave to present a rich and complex set of snapshots that document the first-urbanised Alevi generation’s decreasing possibilities of action in the urban context. Accordingly, the empirical data that informs this piece has been collected by a series of qualitative and semi-structured interviews with the first-urbanised Alevi generation, children of those who migrated to urban areas in the 1960s and wittingly or unwittingly kept their identities undisclosed to varying degrees. Those interviewed come from a range of different professional backgrounds, with the only common point being that they have spent their childhoods and adult years in Istanbul, Turkey. Through a close engagement with the empirical material, this paper addresses the effects of the AKP’s Sunnification process centring around political Islam on the first generation urbanised Alevis and to what extent the systemic nature of this process attenuates or takes away their agency in the urban context. The account is focused around three key themes including daily life, institutional forms of discrimination and the workplace.

Author(s):  
Marianne Clark ◽  
Deborah Lupton

The implementation of physical distancing measures and lockdowns across the globe to control the spread of COVID-19 has led to the home becoming a focal point of exercise and fitness activities for many people. A plethora of digital tools were hastily assembled to help people workout at home or in spaces close to home: including apps with workout suggestions, online videos and livestreamed fitness classes. In this article, we draw on our empirical material collected through semi-structured interviews and virtual ethnographic home tours with Australian adults to explore the ‘pandemic fitness assemblages’ generated with and through their improvised pandemic fitness practices inside and outside their homes. These materials illustrate how bodies, digital and non-digital technologies, and place and space came together and help to surface the affects, sensations and embodiments that emerged. We describe how people’s re-imagined fitness practices contributed to daily routines, transformed the atmospheres of the home and yielded affective experiences of escape. To do so, we think with sociospatial and feminist materialism theoretical frameworks that emphasise the generative relationships emerging between human and more-than-human forces and entities. Our analysis further illuminates the situatedness and relationality of these heterogeneous forces and considers how they come to matter within the broader sociomaterial context of COVID-19.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Ana Amora

Abstract The purpose of this article is to explore the role of gardens in the architecture of hospitals of the so-called “carioca school” of architecture, between the years of 1930 and 1960. In other words, to analyze gardens in the works of carioca architects who surrounded the architect Lucio Costa, or whose projects were influenced by the conceptions of this first generation of modern architects, who first graduated architecture school at the National College of Fine Arts and then, after 1945, at the National College of Architecture, in Rio de Janeiro. The importance of gardens in the architecture of hospitals was mentioned in Edward Stevens’s book “The American hospital of the twentieth century”, in 1918, a publication which can be found at the UFRJ Architecture School library, as well as in the Brazilian doctors’ book collections at the time. Stevens dedicates a chapter of this book to the landscape theme, where he states that the hospital designer and the landscape architect should work together. On the other hand, Pasteur’s discoveries and their implications in the management of hospital space did not occur without the mediation of landscaping. They resulted in changes when it came to choose the site for the hospital building within a city, as well as in its formal typology - from the Tollet model of pavilions, to the existence of green areas surrounding high buildings, and overlapping nurseries. It is also relevant to bear in mind that public nationalist buildings played an important role after the revolution of 1930 in Brazil as they represented the state, and this resulted in significant projects. We are therefore going to present four hospital buildings which were analyzed in our research on the integration of the Arts in the architecture of hospitals. Although the Lagoa Hospital, by Oscar Niemeyer, the Sanatorium Complex of Curicica, by Sérgio Bernardes, the IPPMG, by Jorge Machado Moreira, and the Souza Aguiar Hospital, by Ary Garcia Roza, all have different programs, formal typologies and links with their surrounding area, they are good examples for debating the presence of gardens in the Modern architecture of hospitals in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Three of these examples have fortunately included projects by landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx - the Lagoa Hospital, the IPPMG and the Souza Aguiar Hospital. The two former hospitals have had their buildings be surrounded by large gardens, in order to mitigate the harmful health effects related to the inclusion of hospitals within urban areas. The latter has been built in the 1960s with a complex program, in a dense historical area downtown, but adjacent to an urban park. It includes a vertical garden, which delimits, along with a panel in the hall (also by the same designer), a hallway for the user, between the urban and the healing space.


Author(s):  
Ahmed Ajil ◽  
Manon Jendly ◽  
Claudia Campistol Mas

Abstract Scholarship on security has recently seen a shift from traditionally state-centric, elitist and objectivist conceptions of ‘security’ towards human-centred perspectives, which put emphasis on forms of ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ security, and promote bottom-up empirical inquiries to further our understand of what security looks like ‘from below’. There remains, however, a dearth of empirical material exploring ‘everyday security’. In this paper, we are studying the ‘everyday security’ of a particularly securitized group, namely refugees. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted between 2016 and 2017 with 23 Syrian and Iraqi urban refugees living in the Jordanian cities of Amman and Mafraq. We analyse how they understand and perceive their own (in)security: we do so by focusing, retrospectively, on the factors and events that led up to their flight from their home country (‘pre-flight period’) on the one hand and those shaping their present life in exile in Jordanian urban areas (‘post-flight period’) on the other. Our findings indicate that, while pre-flight insecurity is mostly defined around existential threats to physical integrity, post-flight insecurity is shaped by a more diffuse form of insecurity, resulting from the legal, economic, social and political limbo they are stuck in.


1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 171-190
Author(s):  
Pertti Lahermo ◽  
Jouko Parviainen

In this study the changes in the quality of groundwater are described on the basis of material collected at some groundwater extraction plants situated mainly in urban areas. The causes of the marked increase in the content of dissolved solids are evaluated from the 1960s onwards.


Author(s):  
Ericka A. Albaugh

This chapter examines how civil war can influence the spread of language. Specifically, it takes Sierra Leone as a case study to demonstrate how Krio grew from being primarily a language of urban areas in the 1960s to one spoken by most of the population in the 2000s. While some of this was due to “normal” factors such as population movement and growing urbanization, the civil war from 1991 to 2002 certainly catalyzed the process of language spread in the 1990s. Using census documents and surveys, the chapter tests the hypothesis at the national, regional, and individual levels. The spread of a language has political consequences, as it allows for citizen participation in the political process. It is an example of political scientists’ approach to uncovering the mechanisms for and evidence of language movement in Africa.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 2308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Can Bıyık

The smart city transport concept is viewed as a future vision aiming to undertake investigations on the urban planning process and to construct policy-pathways for achieving future targets. Therefore, this paper sets out three visions for the year 2035 which bring about a radical change in the level of green transport systems (often called walking, cycling, and public transport) in Turkish urban areas. A participatory visioning technique was structured according to a three-stage technique: (i) Extensive online comprehensive survey, in which potential transport measures were researched for their relevance in promoting smart transport systems in future Turkish urban areas; (ii) semi-structured interviews, where transport strategy suggestions were developed in the context of the possible imaginary urban areas and their associated contextual description of the imaginary urban areas for each vision; (iii) participatory workshops, where an innovative method was developed to explore various creative future choices and alternatives. Overall, this paper indicates that the content of the future smart transport visions was reasonable, but such visions need a considerable degree of consensus and radical approaches for tackling them. The findings offer invaluable insights to researchers inquiring about the smart transport field, and policy-makers considering applying those into practice in their local urban areas.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Sciurba

Abstract This study examines the ways in which a pair of identical-looking fraternal twins – first-generation Indian-American adolescent male students at a private all-boys school – construct personal meaning, or textual relevance, as readers. Semi-structured interviews with the two young men were conducted to determine the degrees to which their connections to literature were influenced by a) their racial/ethnic/cultural identities, b) their gender identities, and/or c) other aspects of their identities. The brothers’ responses, which differ significantly from one another’s and demonstrate the complexities of constructing meaning from texts, provide new perspective on how to best reach individual students – particularly students from nondominant groups. The data indicates that educators would benefit significantly from including young people’s perspectives in attempts to represent them and their identities within literacy education contexts. Ultimately, this study calls for a broadened theory of reader response – one that accounts for student diversity, within and across groups, and encourages young people to share how their worlds impact their readings of the word.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-115
Author(s):  
Alice Bombardier

Abstract In an interview, the Iranian painter Ahmad Esfandiari (1922–2012) related that he witnessed a particularly difficult time at the beginning of his career, when he did not know what direction his work might take. Slowly he overcame this fear of the unknown and discovered ‘the pleasure of uncharted paths’. But the critics did not see any social value in his work (Mojabi 1998: 155). In his testimony, Ahmad Esfandiari described the tumultuous 1940s, during which an innovative pictorial style called ‘New Painting’ appeared in Iran. Contrary to popular opinion, contemporary Iranian painting did not begin in the 1960s with the Saqqakhaneh group of artists. Its origins can be found in the 1940s. In this article, conceived as a manifesto, I introduce the first generation of New Painting artists and I argue against a canon that has overlooked them in spite of their innovative accomplishments and profound impact.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul H. Gobster

What does ecological restoration mean in an urban context? More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, and in response to the dynamic patterns of urbanization, a growing number of ecologists, land managers, and volunteers are focusing their efforts in and around cities to restore remnants of natural diversity (Ingram 2008). Ecological restoration is still a quite youthful field, yet many scientists and practitioners hold a relatively fixed set of criteria for what defines a successful restoration project, irrespective of where sites are located. Among the criteria commonly stated, sites should be composed of indigenous species, have a structure and diversity characteristic of currently undisturbed or historically documented “reference” sites, and be maintained through ecological processes such as fire that ensure long-term sustainability with minimal human assistance (Ruiz-Jaén and Aide 2005; SER International 2004). Application of these criteria has led to many ecologically successful restorations, but some ecologists in the field have begun to question whether the same standards can be realistically applied to sites such as those within urban areas that have been radically altered by past human activity (e.g., Martínez and López-Barerra 2008) or are being influenced by novel conditions that result in unpredictable trajectories (Choi 2007). Perhaps more significantly, it is becoming increasingly recognized that the broader viability of restoration projects, especially those in urban areas, hinges on how socially successful they are in gaining public acceptance for restoration activities and practices, building constituencies to assist with implementation and maintenance, and addressing a broader set of sustainability goals that reach beyond the protection of native biodiversity (e.g., Choi et al. 2008; Hobbs 2007; Rosenzweig 2003).


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-230
Author(s):  
Raluca-Daniela Duinea

"The City of Oslo in Jan Erik Vold’s Poems. The aim of this paper is to examine, from a cultural and social perspective, the Norwegian urban areas and everyday situations in Jan Erik Vold’s (b. 1939) poems. Our close-reading technique reveals important social aspects, different places and streets, located in the capital city of Norway, Oslo. These urban poems written by the contemporary Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold contribute to the reconstruction of a new Norwegian cultural identity as it is reflected in a selection of poems taken from Mor Godhjertas glade versjon. Ja (Mother Goodhearted’s Happy Version. Yes, 1968), followed by the poet’s wanderings in the city of Oslo in En som het Abel Ek (One Named Abel Ek, 1988), and concluding with his bitter social criticism in Elg (Moose, 1989) and IKKE. Skillingstrykk fra nittitallet (Not: Broadsides from the Nineties, 1993). Vold’s urban poems emphasise the transition from nyenkle (new simple), friendly and descriptive poems which present closely the city of Oslo on foot, to short, political and social critical poems from the 90s. Thus, it is of great importance to traverse various urban ‘landscapes’ in different periods of time, beginning with the 1960s, followed by the 80s and the 90s. Keywords: Jan Erik Vold, urban poems, social criticism, Norwegian urban areas, the city of Oslo "


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document