Digital Commons Network^™

Tomb Of The Unknown Marxist, Anna Ozbek

Theses and Dissertations

Tomb of the Unknown Marxist tracks a journey of uncovering an individual’s past as a leftist revolutionary in late 1970s Turkey. In doing so, the project explores the political movements of that turbulent period and asks what remains of the revolution in the revolutionary once these moments are well in the past.

Float, Frida Sterenberg

Capstones

A family of Afghan asylum seekers on the Greek island of Lesvos had found a trace of stability in their lives. They lived in a house, found jobs, were developing new skills and were even nurturing some creative vein while they waited for their asylum interview scheduled for early 2020. But all that was taken away, abruptly, when they were transferred to Athens in mid-September.

The illusive feeling of stability is something the family knows all too well.

Raziye, the mother, has been a refugee for four decades and her children their entire life. Raziye and her late husband fled …

Music And Jewish Practice In Contemporary Istanbul: Preserving Heritage, Bending Tradition, Joseph M. Alpar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of ongoing transformations in the sacred musical repertoires practiced by ḥazzanim (synagogue cantors) and their synagogue congregations in Istanbul’s contemporary Jewish community. I argue that clergy and laypeople alike negotiate their religious identities as Turkish Jews in the musical choices they make. While many try to maintain the community’s local music tradition, rooted in makam—the Ottoman Turkish melodic system—others attempt to broaden their repertoire with musics from Israel, the United States, and Ḥabad Hasidic Judaism. I examine adjustments made to the musical components of ritual as responses to decades of Jewish religious life as …

Sedimenting Territory: A Political Geology Of Oil, Earth, And Spatial Politics In Turkey, Zeynep Oguz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building on the recent turn to the material and earthly aspects of resources and political power in environmental anthropology and political geography, this work historically and ethnographically examines the kinds of territorial politics that oil’s materiality, geological qualities, and infrastructures have generated in Turkey. Despite being surrounded by oil-rich neighbors in the Middle East, Turkey’s domestic oil reserves supply only 7 percent of the country’s oil, all of which has been drilled in the Kurdish provinces of Batman, Diyarbakır, and Adıyaman in Turkey’s southeast, where the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) has been fighting the Turkish state since 1984 for cultural …

Clientelism And Democracy In Turkey And Mexico: The Impacts On Regimes Of Political Party Exploitation Of Housing Tenure In Informal Settlements, David J. Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Scholars have identified the abuse of state resources as one of the primary indicators of whether a country will democratize. Clientelist networks are critical to how incumbents exploit state assets to remain in power. When the informal relationships of clientelist parties undermine the formal institutions of the state, the regime is no longer democratic, even where competitive elections take place. Alternately, if a ruling party in such hybrid regimes loses its monopoly on state power, it creates an opening for other parties and social groups to push for democratization. Mexico and Turkey are critical case studies on how clientelist parties …

İbne, Gey, Lubunya: A Queer Critique Of Lgbti+ Discourses In The New Cinema Of Turkey, Azmi Mert Erdem

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my thesis, I examine the intersections between liberalism, neoliberal globalism, and LGBTI+ visibility and identity politics, through films that present “openly” non-normative sexualities through cis/transgender male, female, or non-binary characters in the new cinema of Turkey. First, I survey existing scholarship on how liberal capitalism impacts the formation of LGBTI+ subjectivities and identity politics. Furthermore, I trace how non-normative sexualities, practices, and discourses evolved along with socioeconomic and political shifts in the Turkish Republic following the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, I review Turkey’s adoption of neoliberal ideologies in the 1980s and how these ideologies engage with its local, heterogenous gender …

Paradoxes Of Feminist Stances In “New Turkey”: Reconceiving Ngo-State Relationships In The Case Of Kamer, Irem Kilic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the multifaceted nature of positionality of feminist NGOs and their collaborative relationship with the state, focusing particularly on the case of KAMER, a women’s rights NGO in Turkey. By analyzing the interviews and the fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2018, this study finds that the domain of KAMER’s work, the region in which it operates and the urgency of the needs it caters to necessitates collaboration not only with the state but also with its repressive apparatuses, though the organization can instrumentalize these to further their feminist mission. In order to demonstrate this the following thesis …