Search

This article examines the emergence of Nobel Prize-winning Turkish scientist Aziz Sancar as a scientific persona model. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 2015, Sancar's nationalistic tendencies and close relationship with incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) leaders opened up a wide range of discussions on how a scientist's relationship with politics should be intellectually interpreted. Focusing on the case of Aziz Sancar, this article examines the specific contextual conditions in which a scientist expresses his identity and how it is interpreted by the public. To this end, the aim of this work is to present an in-depth analysis of the discussions that took place in Ekşi Sözlük, a popular social media platform acting as an online forum in Turkey, and news from the national media and to scrutinize how a scientific persona is conceived in Turkey and how Aziz Sancar has been 'de-scienticized' in the heavy polarized Turkish political atmosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey has become a powerful example of rising ethno-religious nationalism since the ruling Justice and Development Party allied with the Nationalist Movement Party in 2016. Conceptualising the political ideology in power as Islamic nationalism, I expose ways in which this ideology is articulated in the education reform discourse of 'new Turkey' through a critical analysis of a foundational education reform report (the Report). The analysis shows various aspects of ethno-religious construction of education reform discourse through a focus on citizenship education (CE) partly because the prominent configuration of power relations manifests itself in considerations of CE. The analysis finds that the Report vilifies CE and proposes an alternative for it: social entrepreneurship. Furthermore, it presents Turkey's diverse population as a monolithic homogenous mass and makes no mention of democracy and human rights values. These findings call out the research community to investigate the negative implications of rising ultra-nationalism for CE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘Alevi openings’ launched in 2007 by the Justice and Development Party have been widely lauded as a historic and unprecedented step in the Turkish Republic. In contrast, this article places the ‘openings’ in a wider historical context, analyzing them in relation to processes of nation-building. Firstly, it is argued that the ‘openings’ marked continuity with previous interventions by state actors, including the military, dating back at least to the 1960s. Secondly, it is contended that these interventions should be regarded as a process of re-framing Alevism within a Turkish–Islamic framework, consigning it to ‘invisibility,’ rather than as democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the gender policies of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—Justice and Development Party) government in Turkey. It is argued that AKP's period in government has been marked by the emergence of a new mode of patriarchy. The article aims at a tentative conceptualisation of this new mode of patriarchy in terms of neoliberal, nationalist and religious discourses in comparison with the already existing republican and liberal modes of patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]