This article argues that digital publics unleash and bolster everyday racism, creating an unregulated space where anonymity and ubiquity enable the dissemination of racist message. By creating broader visibility and wider reach of racist texts and facilitating more participation for racists, social media platforms such as Twitter normalize gendered and place-based racialization of refugees. Recently, hostility and hate became the norm in derogating the refugee identity on social media platforms. To investigate the complexity of digital racism, this article presents a unique case study on Twitter, capturing the widespread user reactions in the aftermath of the mass resettlement of Syrians in Turkey. It examines varying racialization of Syrians on the Turkish Twittersphere, using sentiment and qualitative content analyses of hashtags and mentions on Syrians, when they hit Twitter trends for Turkey for a year, first, for mundane events and, second, during the Turkish state’s occupation in Northern Syria.
This paper explores the relationship between social movements, urban regeneration programmes and media outlets in cities, with a focus on the transformation of urban culture in regards to people's engagement with the spaces of media platforms. The argument is based on the study of cinema-going practices of an audience community in Istanbul, during and preceding the Gezi uprising. By employing ethnographic methods, this paper interrogates the activism of an audience community against the impact of shopping-mallisation and commodification of Istanbul's urban spaces under AKP rule. In order to reclaim ownership of their spaces and future, this audience community claimed their right to the Emek movie theatre, Gezi Park, and other parks whilst creating their own outdoor screenings and social media platforms. This paper also provides an interpretation of social movement development attached to media outlets such as film festivals and screenings, particularly the development of spatial activism in relation to people's use of films, streets, and movie theatres, thus illustrating, challenging and reinforcing rights to the city. More broadly, it gives new insights on the film and protest culture of a 'secular' group within a predominantly Muslim population and shows alternative and creative methods of protesting during a popular uprising.
To capture the relationship between social media, anti-gender and everyday polarisation, this article identifies the ways social media platforms reflect the mundane amidst the interactions of its users over social and political issues. The paper employs textual and content analyses of reactions to ordinary events shared through hashtags and mentions. We examine a recent case of Twitter phenomena over an outing that showed vigorous debates over issues pertaining to gender and its socio-political connotations in Turkey. The outing involved a divorce and custody court case as well as a secret recording, exposing the sexual identity of a woman popstar #Intizar. It showed how micro-stories can foreground macro-political tensions online. The paper shows the ways in which Twitter facilitated conservative, homophobic, patriarchal and Islamist reactions that harnessed deep political polarisation between the AKP government's supporters and those that declared solidarity with LGBTI+ issues. The article follows how a mundane divorce and custody case exhibited the deep political tension portraying the depth of increasing polarisation over gender on a global scale, exemplified by a Turkish case.
In Istanbul's history, Taksim Square has always been an identity place for activists, similar to Tahrir Square in Cairo or Maidan in Kiev, but this paper points out that the Gezi protests created other identity places across Istanbul. This article focuses on the notion of 'spaces of hope' in relation to 'cycles of protests' and 'repertoires of collective action', in examining the post-Occupy activism in Istanbul following the Gezi protests and in the face of increasing authoritarianism. Based on two phases of ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul from 2013 to 2017, commencing during the Gezi Park protests and later expanding to its anniversaries and other political events in the central parks of Istanbul, the paper traces the spatial memories, political emotions and cultural legacy of waves of protests. It defines the previously occupied parks as 'political parks' (Bayat, 1997, 2012) where identities of protesters transform and intersect through offline networks formed at various parks in Istanbul. This paper makes the case for how people's identities and political emotions transform due to their engagement with the spaces of social movements not only at their peak but also following their demise in an attempt to test, reinforce and challenge the participatory and spatial strategies of the Gezi protests and from a wider perspective other Occupy movements.
Despite the steady growth of authoritarianism, image activism is persistent and vibrant in Turkey. This paper examines how activists/artists use the production and circulation of political images to combat the institutional exclusion of oppositional voices following the Gezi protests (2013) and the attempted coup (2016). Using visual rhetorical analysis of images and in-depth interviews with courtroom painters, the paper focuses on 'political' drawings produced in enclaves of courtrooms and the strategies of image activists in visually narrating the political prisoners and/or detainees for wider networks, forming intersectional communities and creating spatial and digital visibility. In the context of the image activism in the post-Occupy Turkey, the passage from the digital to post-digital is based on, first, the top-down restrictive regulations in public and semi-public spaces and increasing police presence in places where activists previously met, second, rising surveillance of the digital platforms, including the troll armies of the AKP government.
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