This dissertation is an ethnographic study of politics of youth culturing in contemporary Turkey. More specifically, it analyzes the politics of temporality that characterized the youth culturing program of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/AKP) over the decade of 2010s. On the one hand, it focuses on the discursive, organizational, affective, and material dimensions of the AKP’s youth-oriented efforts. On the other hand, it explores what it means to go through the life stage of youth in the AKP-dominated conservative and lower-class milieus in contemporary Istanbul. The AKP has dominated Turkish politics since the turn of the century and its strongman leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has become the longest-ruling as well as the most consequential leader of modern Turkey since its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Initially a peripheral political movement, the AKP has gradually consolidated its power and moved to the core of Turkish state structure. The decade of the 2010s has been marked by the AKP’s ambition to establish cultural power, which has manifested itself in the form of forceful interventions into the fields of education and youth culturing, among others. As part of this effort, it has mobilized massive state resources alongside its non-governmental network of organizations to promote certain notions of history and practices of piety among young people. This dissertation analyzes these efforts and how they resonated in the lives of young people. Its conceptual focus is on the interplay of multiple temporalities that shaped the uneven space of interaction between the governmental power and situated young subjects. The analysis is grounded in a two-year, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in three districts of Istanbul; namely Esenler, Fatih, and Üsküdar. These sites include youth culture centers, youth-oriented events such as seminars, festivals, and trips, an Ottoman language course, and several Ottoman-themed spaces such as cafes and bookstores. Through the analysis of ethnographic data, I argue that at the core of the AKP’s youth culturing efforts is a governmental historicity that works to condition youth’s orientations to historical time. I outline the powerful techniques, narratives, spaces, and promises that were mobilized to recruit youth into this collective historicity, yet I also show how recruitment is an always ongoing process that is contingent upon youth’s constantly recalibrated aspirations.

Creator

• Ozipek, Aydin

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-qjbk-rc35

Subject

• Middle Eastern studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15594
• etdadmin_upload_820250

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright