Hande Eslen-Ziya

University of Stavanger · Department of Media and Social Sciences

This article investigates the puzzle of the emergence of Turkish politicians’ discourse on population stagnation and growth despite healthy population growth and an above-replacement-level birth rate. We understand this emergence through considering how politicians link national identity and economic value to population increase. Empirically, our a...

Ideas are “claims about descriptions of the world, causal relationships or the normative legitimacy of certain actions” (Parsons 2002, 48). Beland and Waddan argue that ideas are the blueprints that “reformers can mobilize as a coherent model for policy change” (2007, 771). Yet, this does not mean that any progressive policy blueprint will be susta...

This article uses childcare as a case study to test the impact of ideas that embody a traditional understanding of gender relations in relation to childcare. Conservative ideas regard increasing female labor market participation as a cause of decreasing fertility on the functioning of a set of general policies to increase fertility rates. It looks...

The recent democratic movements in the Middle East, especially in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, put forward a new kind of political activism accelerated by social media. Whereas in these countries the social media created opportunities for the social movement referred to as the “Arab Spring,” this paper looks at the neighboring...

This article explores how the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, Turkey, exemplify the changing character of contemporary social movements, where teamwork and collaboration are supported and the ability to empower, support, and engage others is emphasized. We argue that the role of leadership in social movements in general and in the Turkish Gezi cont...

Recently, academia has become an arena of political conflict that results in the corrosion of academic life in general. Restrictions of academic freedom and lack of research autonomy, in addition to standardized success criteria of neoliberal universities, have created an academic reality contributing to hierarchy, competition, anxiety, burnout , a...

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic has resurfaced challenges to gender equality and gender relations both worldwide and in Norway. There have been massive public discussions on social media platforms, highlighting the potential of analysing public discourses in a non-reactive manner (Rauchfleisch et al. , 2021). Further, discourses from social media may...

This article attempts to show how government-supported women’s NGOs (GO-NGOs) in Turkey actively contribute to the construction of neoliberal, conservative, antigender discourses of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. Since the second decade of the 2000s, Turkey has undergone rapid de-democratization as a result of AKP’s election vi...

The Gezi Protests, with no centralized leadership, created many different interest groups uttering their demands. Women’s groups were among the most visible. This chapter demonstrates that women’s activism, started with the Gezi Protests, marks an important era in the Turkish feminist movement and created a broad alliance between feminist groups. Y...

Recent scholarship considers digital platforms' potential to serve as sites for feminist counter-spaces. 'Speaking out' or disclosing gender-based violence online allows survivors to give voice to their experiences and create a political arena for seeking informal forms of justice. What is significant in these instances is not a shift away from for...

Remediating Sound studies the phenomena of remixing, mashup and recomposition: forms of reuse and sampling that have come to characterise much of YouTube's audiovisual content. Through collaborative composition, collage and cover songs to reaction videos and political activism , users from diverse backgrounds have embraced the democratised space of...

The main goal of this chapter is to understand right-wing populism and troll-science discourses on gender under the public normative order of the current AKP (Justice and Development Party) government. For this I focus on articles published in KADEM Kadın Arasṃtırmaları Dergisi (Journal of Women’s Studies), a pro-government, peer-reviewed so-called...

Our main goal in this article is to discuss the structural and persistent problems experienced by women academics, especially with respect to the gendered divisions of academic tasks and unequal divisions of care obligations in the domestic sphere. The analysis is based on reflexive thematic analysis of the open-ended questions of an online questio...

So far, the focus on violence has been it as a concept and its evolution within contemporary societies. For instance, several studies consider violence to be influenced by singular cultural issues and perceptions, with the primary point being the presence of an authoritative presence capable of acting violently. Others instead focus on the degrees...

The search for alternative knowledge, conspiracy theories, distrust of expertise and anti-science movements are gaining momentum and post-truth populism is speeding up on the back of fake news. The crisis of truth refers to an era where evidence and objective facts get lost in sentiment, emotion, and personal beliefs. Relying on emotions, creationi...

The increasing popularity of Twitter as a medium for sharing and debating scientific information brings forth questions about the type of narratives emerging around environmental/climate change and global warming. This article maps the landscape of narratives of how Twitter is used to communicate about environmental issues in Turkey. It displays ho...

This article, by addressing the growing anti-feminist activism and mobilization and its consequences for gender equality and women’s rights, sheds light on anti-feminist resistance in Turkey and Norway. Using the concept of counter movement, we study men’s rights mobilization in Turkey and Norway, two countries with different histories and realitie...

‘Coronavirus could kill off populism’ (Financial Times June 20, 2020), ‘Beware a new wave of populism, born out of coronavirus-induced economic inequity’ (The Guardian, April 18, 2020), ‘Where the Virus Is Growing Most: Countries With “Illiberal Populist” Leaders’ (New York Times, June 2, 2020), ‘How European populists are using coronavirus as a po...

This chapter explores the relationship between academic freedom, science, and right-wing politics using the example of the recent events around Professor Andrea Pető’s recent publication at Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte which lead to her resignation from the Hungarian Accreditation Committee. It illustrates how illiberal democracies shake th...

Edited collection - Populism&Science

We now live in an age of unhidden gender wars where direct violence occurs within online and offline spaces. These online spaces on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram become venues for attacks on gender and woman’s rights, as well as its intersection with race and ethnicity. Such online hate expressions and networked harassments channelled towards wome...

Abstract: This article by addressing the growing anti-feminist activism and mobilization and its consequences for gender equality and women’s rights, sheds light on antifeminist resistance in Turkey and Norway. Using the concept of counter movement, we study men’s rights mobilization in Turkey and Norway, two countries with different histories and...

This article shows how Twitter users’ discontent with the quarantine hotel regulations in Norway turned into a digital protest. We discuss how the sharing and communication of messages through hashtags on Twitter facilitate the perception of the hashtag as a cultural object that activates a political agenda and perpetuates a digital social movement...

Immigrants have been found to be disproportionately impacted during the COVID-19 pandemic across the world. Our study, exploring the experiences of immigrants in Norway during the pandemic, is based on interviews and focus group discussions with 10 and 21 immigrants, respectively. Our analysis showed that participants perceived the circumstances in...

This article explores the Facebook posts of Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg to highlight the key features of her crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws on data from Solberg’s Facebook posts from February 27, 2020 to February 9, 2021 (i.e., starting from the day when the first case of COVID-19 was recorded in Norway until t...

As public irrationality, conspiracy theories, and anti-science movements are gaining momentum, we observe a “crisis of scientific truth”. It is a distrust of expertise and scientific knowledge and right-wing populism speeded with fake news. The crisis of scientific truth refers to an era where evidence and objective facts go missing in sentiment, e...

In assessing how politicians generate population politics through parliamentary debates, I am interested in the discursive construction of such debates. Political debates are important contexts, influencing, and also being influenced by larger cultural processes drawing the boundaries of citizenship. This article carries out comparative and multi-m...

Despite the egalitarian and collegial philosophy in its ideals, academic market is segregated and gendered where women receive fewer rewards than their male counterparts, are under-represented, segregated and excluded from participation in the formal and informal academic structures in academia. The country contexts, the gendered academic organizat...

What makes humour an honest and a direct communication tool for people? How do social networking and digital media transmit user-generated political and humorous content? Our research argues that the way in which humour is deployed through digital media during protest action allows protestors to assert humanity and sincerity against dehumanising po...

This article explores how men living in Istanbul talk about the sociality of house and care work – vacuuming the house, cooking, doing the laundry – in their everyday lives. It shows how these tasks are crucial for understanding contemporary Turkish men and how they are intertwined with notions of masculinity. This research is part of a larger stud...

Discursive governance of pro-population politics refers to norm-based mechanisms of governance that utilise intentionally selected slogans in political discourse for dissemination of ideas to further the interests of political authorities. Such ideas can be disseminated via modern communication technologies enabling governance to build social repre...

After years of progress in terms of gender and sexual rights, since 2012 Europe is facing a so-called gender backlash – opposition directed to issues related to reproductive policies and abortion, violence against women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) rights and gay marriages, gender mainstreaming and sex educatio...

That the COVID‐19 pandemic has affected the work conditions of large segments of the society is in no doubt. A growing body of journalistic accounts raised the possibility that the lockdown caused by the pandemic affects women and men in different ways, due mostly to the traditionally gendered division of labor in the society. We attempt to test th...

This article explores how Twitter has emerged as a signifier of contemporary protest. Using the concept of ‘social media imaginaries’, a derivative of the broader field of ‘media imaginaries’, our analysis seeks to offer new insights into activists’ relation to and conceptualisation of social media and how it shapes their digital media practices. E...

This article is an endeavour to explore the changing networking strategies of women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Turkey over the last decade. We delineate the shifts and changes during what we call the de-democratization process where secular women’s organizations face significant constraints and difficulties while networking and lobb...

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of...

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of...

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of...

By using the Gezi Park protests that took place in Turkey in 2013 as a case, we explore the significance of emotional echo-chamber involved in protests. The analyses are composed of thirty-seven interviews conducted with activists on how they define and understand their preferences and motivations for protesting. We discuss how participants get inf...

Using the Gezi Park protests as a case study this article considers the performative component of protest movements including how and why protestors actively produce protest activity ‘on the ground’ and how this is expressed through visual images. It looks beyond iconic images which appear as emblematic of the protest and instead shifts our focus t...

Following the AKP’s second election victory in 2007, significant changes to the party programme and strategy evolved into the ‘New Turkey,’ a new, more abstractly defined discursive and operational space. This both redefined democratic practices and generated a backlash to gender equality and the status of women. As media is a powerful hegemonic to...

This paper examines expressions and experiences of internalised sexual stigma with respect to definitions of masculinity and identity conflicts through a thematic analysis of life-history narratives of 14 self-identified gay men living in Turkey. The analysis reveals that internalised sexual prejudice emerges when widely accepted hegemonic masculin...

This article focuses on the resurgence of women’s movements in Turkey and Norway against the backdrop of their historical trajectories and wider gender policies. Throughout the 2010s, both countries witnessed a similar set of conservative and neoliberal policies that intervened in women’s bodily rights. In both countries, women’s movements responde...

Through analysis of fifty in-depth interviews with married men from different socioeconomic backgrounds and ages in seven provinces in Turkey, this article examines the internal dilemmas and contradictions in the construction of masculine identities in the context of social change in the country. The focus is on men's experiences of most salient re...

The present study investigates how gay men in Turkey define masculinities in general and their masculinities in particular. Various studies have so far been conducted to explore the construction of different forms of masculinities, yet the scope has mostly been on heterosexual masculinities and little is known about the masculinity construction of...

Homophobia, in the broadest sense, is defined as the fear and/or hatred of homosexual people. It is expressed through negative attitudes and behaviors towards homosexuals. Homophobia is regarded as the main organizing principle to define manhood in American culture. Men tend to describe masculinity and manhood as anti-homosexuality and by negating...

This chapter demonstrates that the composition of the labor market in a host country, the labor demands of the economy, and the related official indifference to migration can foster a gendered composition of migrants. Moreover, the gender and labor dynamics in a host country can illegalize immigration even if the legal infrastructure as well as pol...

Since its establishment in 1923, the Republic of Turkey has assumed a sacred character, owing primarily to the influence of republicanism, the country’s dominant political religion. Processes of modernization, inherent in republicanism, became the main instigators for the improvement of women’s rights in Turkey from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. How...