University of Twente Student Theses
The Protestors of Gezi Park: Analyzing discursive clashes at the edge of Europe
Sommer, Niklas David (2014) The Protestors of Gezi Park: Analyzing discursive clashes at the edge of Europe.
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| Abstract: | The Gezi protests that sparked off in May 2013 in Istanbul turned out to be largest uprising in the history of the Turkish Republic. Especially in terms of the EU candidate country’s secular-Islamic divide, the protests have, in academia, thus far been rather marginally scrutinized. Drawing on this Kulturkampf from a discursive perspective, I will investigate the extent to which the Gezi protestors’ discursive practices show a dialectics of the two clashing discourses in this field - Kemalism and political Islam. Moreover, an inquiry will be made on whether the protest discourse can be considered as a cosmopolitan – a European discourse. After identifying the conceptual traits of the discourses under study, I proceed by conducting a critical discourse analysis (CDA). Deriving my cases from randomly sampled protest texts, the findings eventually show that the Gezi discourse earmarked a cosmopolitan transition from Kemalism to post-Kemalism which, mainly due to the discursive impact of political Islam, further deepened social cleavages in Turkey. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 18 languages and literature, 71 sociology, 73 cultural anthropology |
| Programme: | Management Society and Technology BSc (56654) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/66011 |
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