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Microcelebrity involvement in politics has recently gained some attention in academic research but the emphasis is mainly on the microcelebrities that exist in settings where freedom of speech is protected. Whereas in settings like Turkey where explicit dissent is criminalised and denied public attention, digital spaces maintained by microcelebrities constitute an important site for dissident narratives gaining much needed visibility. At the same time, their visibility and reach put these accounts at a considerable risk of being detected and penalised by the authorities. In this thesis, I explore the ways Twitter microcelebrities partake in anti-government political talk on Turkish Twitter through an analysis of 97 microcelebrity accounts in the 3 months leading up to the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections. This election period is particularly important as it took place under a state of emergency and during which the opposition parties were denied access to mass media, which meant that a large portion of political discourse was confined to online spaces. I find that despite the staggering risks, Twitter microcelebrities consistently framed partaking in anti-government political talk during elections as a duty for all microcelebrity accounts due to their ability to command public attention. In doing so, they distanced themselves from specific political parties and created narratives that appeal to a politically diverse audience by placing the emphasis on their common aim of replacing the AKP government. In fulfilling this demanding task, to mitigate the risk of lending visibility to potentially incriminating content, these accounts disguised their criticisms behind a creative language relying on their internet culture literacy and the vernacular of the oppositional subcultures in Turkey. I argue that while microcelebrity accounts promote a politics of recognition among politically diverse audiences and create a space for strategic unity, these evasion strategies that increasingly inform the conventions of political talk in online spaces, inevitably create a divide by giving political agency exclusively to those who are "in on" these online conventions.

Chronic conditions and their management have become a major global public health problem which poses a serious challenge for both health care systems and affected individuals. Type 2 diabetes is one such condition affecting almost 200 million people around the world, a number that is expected to double by 2020. As with most chronic conditions its management requires significant and permanent changes in people’s daily life practices as well as a strict medication regimen. Recent research demonstrates that it is possible to control the complications of diabetes, and even to prevent its development in predisposed individuals by following recommended treatments. Yet studies show that only 2% of people living with diabetes heed their treating team’s advice. This signals a serious discordance between scientifically generated information and its place in the daily lives of people living with diabetes. This study sought to discover how to change the factors that prevent people with type 2 diabetes from following their recommended treatments. Firstly a participant observation process in four diabetes education centres was used to define the characteristics of the context in which people with diabetes and their treating teams interacted. This was followed by a nine-month participatory action process in two of the four centres in which participants defined the problematic areas in the management of their diabetes and devised plans to tackle these problems. They then attempted to implement these plans while exploring how and why their plans did or did not work. The findings indicate that the decision to follow recommended treatments is far from being a matter of individual choice. Rather it is heavily influenced by a complex interaction of numerous factors that people with diabetes have limited power to change. This study reveals that the management of chronic conditions such as diabetes could be enhanced where operational and practical knowledge about the condition is provided to people living with the disorder by health care providers responsive to patients’ perspectives, and where patients, providers and policy-makers recognise that health is a resource constructed in the wider social context, whose every element needs to be harnessed in encouraging people to make healthier life decisions.