|
" The Politics of Middle Class Professionals and the Global South's Recent Protest Wave: "
Evcimen, Gamze
Keyder, Çağlar
| Document Type
|
:
|
Latin Dissertation
|
| Language of Document
|
:
|
English
|
| Record Number
|
:
|
1104864
|
| Doc. No
|
:
|
TLpq2275082577
|
| Main Entry
|
:
|
Evcimen, Gamze
|
|
|
:
|
Keyder, Çağlar
|
| Title & Author
|
:
|
The Politics of Middle Class Professionals and the Global South's Recent Protest Wave:\ Evcimen, GamzeKeyder, Çağlar
|
| College
|
:
|
State University of New York at Binghamton
|
| Date
|
:
|
2019
|
| student score
|
:
|
2019
|
| Degree
|
:
|
Ph.D.
|
| Page No
|
:
|
262
|
| Abstract
|
:
|
Politics of middle class professionals has been a central concern for political sociology. Mobilization of highly educated professionals in recent wave of protests in major cities of Global South like Cairo, Tunis, Caracas, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, and Istanbul brought about a revival of this debate. An upper sector of middle class professionals participated in these protests, which generated social and political transformations in several societies, and their political agency in relation to sociopolitical trajectories of these societies requires further research. Although existing studies offer multiple faces of middle class politics, ranging from conformism to advocacy for social change, what form of political agency professionals in a particular society would pursue at a certain moment remains ambiguous. So, politicization of middle class professionals in recent protest wave and forms of their political agency in the aftermath of protests requires an alternative theoretical approach. My study draws from theorizations of Pierre Bourdieu and Antonio Gramsci as well as from studies of class formation in order to explore balancing acts of middle class professionals between strategies of class distinction and class reconciliation and to analyze their politics between pro-systemic tendencies, such as support for neoliberalism and political illiberalism, and anti-systemic orientations, like advocacy of social liberalism, political pluralism and social democracy. Based on ten month’s fieldwork of participant observation and in-depth and semi-structured interviews with a group of professionals, who graduated from Turkey’s leading universities, worked in large private firms, and participated in 2013 protests in Istanbul, my dissertation examines politics of an upper sector of middle class professionals in the light of Gezi protests and their aftermath. In this study, I first explore how these professionals form and practice a new middle class subjectivity between global affiliations in social life and local identifications at work. My research illustrates that their balancing of class distinction and class reconciliation positioned politics of these professionals between anti- and pro-status quo orientations as reflected by their advocacy of social liberalism and lack of support for political pluralism before Gezi protests. Secondly, I investigate how their experiences of confronting police violence, realizing control of media, encountering difference, and formation of collective identity during Gezi protests affected politicization, discourses and practices of these professionals while they also influenced Gezi’s slogans, activities and public representations. Third, I address how their mobilization in Gezi protests transformed political agency of these professionals towards class reconciliation and anti-systemic politics by examining their political visions and agendas in Gezi’s aftermath. While these professionals promoted alternative political imaginaries, such as secular ethics and public morality, new selves and new politics, political liberalism and plural democracy, and social justice and social democracy, against religious-conservative, authoritarian, majoritarian, and neo-populist politics of AKP, their political agency also remained limited in terms of a vision of post-politics and activism in Oy ve Ötesi (Vote and Beyond). My analysis demonstrates that although these professionals expressed diverse political identifications beyond mainstream politics in Turkey, changing political landscape engendered an interruption in their politicization as well as their isolated selves and political disengagement.
|
| Subject
|
:
|
Political science
|
|
|
:
|
Sociology
|
| |