Academic Articles (Selected)
Academic Articles (Selected)
More-than-Human Lifeworlds: Ethics, Ontology and Relationality in Local Environmental Struggles
Society and Natural Resources, Volume 37, Issue 5, Special Issue: What is at Stake? The Ontological Dimension of Environmental Conflicts, 2024.
Local environmental conflicts are often framed as “resource conflicts” in the political ecology literature. Based on ethnographic research on local community struggles against run-of-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey’s East Black Sea Region, this article aims to demonstrate the limitation of the “resource” frame. The article discusses how and why rivers are more than “natural resources” for the rural communities of the region, maintaining non-human entities as integral not only to the umwelt (environment, surroundings), but also to the lebenswelt (lifeworld). It maintains the centrality of the more-than-human lifeworld in the constitution of relational ontologies and ethics of coexistence, and in the formation of political agency.
Feminist Methodologies in Social Movement Studies: Gender, Positionality and Research in Practice
In Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements, ed by Laurence Cox et. al., Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024 - with Sevil Çakır Kılınçoğlu
In this chapter, we demonstrate what a feminist perspective can achieve in social movement research practice. Drawing on our respective research projects on mixed-gender - local environmental and radical leftist - movements, we discuss the feminist methodological principles and strategies to construct gender as an analytical category in social movements research. Besides exploring empirical ways of making women’s experiences, practices, and knowledge visible, our work illustrates how gender operates in various areas and processes of social movement mobilization.
Women's Anti-Hydropower Activism in Turkey: Water, Environmental Struggles, and Bodily Experiences
In Routledge Handbook of Water and Governance, ed by Tatiana Acevedo Guerrera et al., 2024.
Drawing on the empirical case of the East Black Sea Region, the chapter explores water’s worth beyond its immediate use and symbolic value and maintains the centrality of women’s bodily experiences to their emergent political agency against HEPPs. It specifically focuses on the embodied relation between women and river waters, treating this relation as a material context constitutive of the lifeworld, in which memory, history, and sense of place are also produced and conserved. It maintains the conceptual potential of a body-centered, phenomenological perspective to contribute to the field of gender, water, and environmental struggles by demonstrating the centrality of bodily, lived experience, sense, and affect to the way these struggles are framed and enacted.
Book Review - Embodying geopolitics: Generations of women’s activism in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon by Nicola Pratt
Space and Society, Volume 26, Issue 1, 2022.
Justice as relationality: socio-ecological justice in the context of anti-hydropower movements in Turkey
Die Erde, Volume 121, No 2-3, 2020.
Based on extensive fieldwork on local community struggles against small-scale run-of-river hydropower plants in Turkey, this article expands the justice frame of environmental justice scholarship by going beyond the established conceptions of environmental justice as distribution Drawing on ethnographical fieldwork conducted in the East Black Sea region of Turkey, the article introduces the notion of socio-ecological justice to translate the relationality of the social and the ecological, of human life and non-human world, to the vocabulary of justice.
Rethinking justice: Struggles for environmental commons and the notion of socio‐ecological justice
Antipode, volume 51, Issue 1, 2019.
This article introduces a notion of socio-ecological justice based on theoretically informed empirical research on community struggles against run-of-river hydropower plants in Turkey. Using Fraser's tripartite model as a starting point, it explores possibilities of expanding the borders of justice as a concept. Maintaining the intrinsic relationship between social and ecological phenomena, it calls for rethinking “sociality” and “social justice” in the light of a relational ontology of human and non-human worlds. The notion of socio-ecological justice, thus, extends the community of justice, framing the relational existence of human and non-human ecologies as a matter of justice.
Gender and framing: Gender as a main determinant of frame variation in Turkey's anti-hydropower movement
Women's Studies International Forum, Volume 74, 2019.
This article builds on the insights of feminist theory and employs the conceptual vocabulary of the social movement framing perspective in maintaining gender as a main parameter of framing processes. Drawing on ethnographic research on local community struggles against hydropower plants in the Eastern Black Sea Region of Turkey, this article maintains the centrality of gender to framing processes.
A feminist-phenomenology of women’s activism against hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region
Gender, Place & Culture, Volume 24, Issue 6, 2017.
Taking a feminist-phenomenological perspective of the body, this article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the embodied subjectivity of women in the movement against hydropower plants (HPPs) in the culturally and spatially specific context of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Informed by a feminist engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘the body-subject’, ‘the flesh’ and Einfühlung, the article places subjectivity within a relational ontology of sentience and intelligence in which corporeal experiences, senses and affects condition cognitive and agential processes. Bodily senses and affects are thus treated as media of subjectivity. By developing a body-centred feminist-phenomenological approach to political subjectivity, it introduces a novel way of analysing women’s activisms within and beyond environmental movements.
In Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance, ed by Gavin Brown et al., Bristol University Press, 2017 - with Serhat Karakayali
The chapter analyses the role of materiality in the formation of a specific political atmosphere in Istanbul’s Gezi Park during the protests of June 2013, arguing that material infrastructures have different impacts according to the specificity of the encounter of actions, objects, spaces, and affects that produce them. In the particular case of Gezi Park, the materials, objects and infrastructures did not primarily serve to build a sustainable space of protest, but essentially functioned in relating individuals in a certain way, in creating bonds and affects and in enabling a process of emergence and recomposition.
Humor, Revolt and Subjectivity
In Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices, ed by Andreas Oberprantacher and Andrei Sicladi, Springer, 2016 - with Serhat Karakayali
This chapter discusses the role of humour for political protest during the Gezi events in Turkey in the summer of 2013. By drawing on diverse theoretical references ranging from Freud to Virno, it argues that humour’s particular structure allows social movements to engage in the construction of political subjectivities alternative to what the norms of the given social order provide.
Why Not EU? Dynamics of the Changing Turkish Attitudes Towards EU Membership
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Volume 24, Issue 1, 2016.
This article aims to contribute to the discussion on Turkish accession to the EU, asking the famous question ‘Why not Turkey?’ the other way around. ‘Why not EU?’ is the emerging question, as the alienation of Turkish government and public opinion from the EU membership objective requires urgent intellectual and political engagement. This article discusses political developments pushing Turkey away from the EU, and it explores the social and historical dynamics behind the rapidly changing Turkish public opinion. The Gramscian concept of ‘common sense’ is used to analyse the complex and contradictory tendencies within the Turkish public opinion, which has oscillated between very enthusiastic support and strong alienation.
Hegemony in the Making: TÜSİAD's Hegemonic Role in the Context of Turkey's EU Membership Process
Spectrum: Journal of Global Studies, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2015.
This article aims at a critical contribution to neo-Gramscian political economy literature on agency of transnational capitalist class in shaping the global socio-economic order through the empirical analysis of hegemonic agency of TÜSİAD (Turkish Industry and Business Association) in formation of EU membership as a hegemonic project in Turkey in the first half of the 2000s. Drawing Poulantzas close to Gramsci and using his distinction between the power bloc and the dominated classes/groups, it introduces the notion of double moments of hegemony, which marks a comprehensive and multidimensional understanding of hegemony as a process involving two interrelated moments – within the power bloc and over a class-divided society.
The Spirit of Gezi: The Recomposition of Political Subjectivities in Turkey
New Formations, Number 83: Affect and Ideology, 2014 - with Serhat Karakayali
The paper focuses on three aspects by analysing the recent Turkish case, the Gezi Park protests. Firstly, it explores what the authors call the process of 'recomposition of people', which is connected to the emergence of new subjectivities and social practices, and eventually to the emergence of new norms, as indicated by the pervasive reference to the 'Spirit of Gezi'. Secondly it discusses the virtually classical phenomenon of emergence by examining infrastructures and practices of 'commoning', which created what many participants of the protests lived as a transgressive experience. Thirdly, drawing on a Spinozan theoretical framework, the authors investigate the affective dimensions of the Gezi protest, emphasising the transformative role played by humour during the uprising.