A decade ago, Islamic early education centers serving three to six-year-old children became popular in Turkey. These have ranged from easily accessible home-based care with scarce resources devoted to early education together with the teaching of the Quran to minors to fancy and expensive preschools that offered the teaching of foreign languages and numerous extracurriculars, in addition to the teaching of Islamic values. The current government and local authorities allowed, promoted, and coopted these institutions, naming them “community-based education models” or “value-based early education.” To understand how these early institutions expanded with the catalyst of Islamic groups and organizations, as well as the government, I interviewed a total of fifty parents, teachers, NGO representatives, and policymakers in Turkey. I also analyzed statistics, policy documents, NGO reports, and newspaper coverage of education in Turkey. Scholars researching contentiousness in the education sector have shown that contestations over values and norms lead to competition and new institutional forms, including outside of the formal education system. In the Turkish context, the already existing divisions around secular and Islamic education pushed individuals to find their “neighborhoods/mahalle” in the Islamic preschools that are seen as the continuation of the traditional schools, mahalle mektebi, which were shut down during the 1920s modernization, secularization, and centralization reforms. As parents explain, while the cities lose their earlier fabric of the traditional neighborhoods at a setting characterized by sharp contestations and rampant inequalities in the education sector, conservative individuals claim to have found refuge in their culturally familiar yet isolated communities sharing “similar conservative values.” While the lower SES parents prefer Islamic preschools because of a common cultural language or already existing networks in their neighborhoods, middle and upper SES parents actively pursue opportunities for the religious upbringing of their children in line with their values and membership in Islamic groups. At the same time, several local-level governments and the central government also promote conservativism in education and care sectors, in addition to marketization and involvement of non-governmental actors, which furthers the prevalence of Islamic preschools in a context that is defined by limited access to early childhood care and education.

AKP government established an arts and culture hegemony that was constructed at the beginning to be an anti-Republican establishment. This stance has changed recently, starting with personal appointments of the AKP government to the head of the State Theatres, especially starting with the failed military coup attempt in 2016. Since then, it has become a common practice for AKP to appoint the Head of the State Theatres, who in return create seasons that cherish conservative playwrights such as Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, or order ‘local and national’ seasons when ‘national unity’ is felt to be under threat by the government, such as after the 2016 military coup attempt. These hints of policy change from complete denial and attempts at closure to hegemony-establishing institutional moves became undeniable in 2021 with a radical initiative for the AKP government. As part of the approaching 100th year anniversaries in 2023, AKP government made it their duty to revise the Atatürk Cultural Center at Taksim Square, enlarged it to endorse a variety of productions, and for the opening of the new Atatürk Cultural Center in 2021, they ordered a new ballet, Yunus Emre, and a new opera, Sinan. For the context of this paper presentation, I plan to give this background and focus on Sinan opera and its performative elements. After the 2021 premiere of Sinan, the libretto of the opera was published by Vakıf Bank Publishing House in 2022, making this one of the very few (if not the first) Turkish-language opera libretto publications in the Republic of Turkey that is accessible to general readership. Moreover, right after the premier of the Sinan opera, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shared the full recording of the opera in his official YouTube account on the Republic Day of 2022, on October 29. Thanks to being widely documented immediately after its release, I will examine this important case study and its political meaning by both looking into the performance work itself, and also through questioning the political parallels between Atatürk’s own ordering (and personally dramaturging) of the Özsoy opera, widely known as the “first Turkish opera”, which premiered in 1934 for Rıza Shah’s diplomatic visit to Ankara.

In the industrial zone of Çorum, workers change their work overalls at the specially designated time for Friday lunch break and get on the bus provided by the employer to go collectively to the Organized Industrial Zone mosque to perform the Friday prayer. It is voiced by many interlocutors in their mid-50s and 60s that in their youth, some 30-40 years ago, in what is today referred as the 'old Turkey,' where religious life was relatively confined to the private sphere and its display in the public sphere was frowned upon, the collective performance of Friday prayer in the work context was quite unlikely and uncommon. However, especially in the last twenty years under the ruling Justice and Development party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), the expansion of the religious sphere, the increasing legitimacy of religious thought and behavior, and the visibility and funding of both state and non-state religious institutions has played a significant role in the social, political, and economic transformation of the country. In this talk, against the backdrop of debates on the religionization and secularization in Turkey, I will discuss which religious practices are performed in workplaces, what kind of regulations and negotiations are involved, and within what limits they are applied. Drawing on 12-month ethnographic field research conducted in the industry of Çorum/Turkey between 2015 and 2016, including two workplace ethnographies and 93 in-depth interviews, I will demonstrate how the employers’ time-discipline based on the motivation for profit reconciles with the religious time in work environments involving Alevis, Sunnis, religious, and non-religious individuals, or how it does not reconcile, and what conflicts or silences it creates in daily work life. These conflicts and silences show that expansion of Islamic field in daily life in Turkey is not perceived as monolithic and harmonious as it may initially appear when one looks at the crowds going to Friday prayers. I argue that there are varying degrees and claims of religiosity and its practice, particularly of Sunni Islam, among religious individuals and also AKP voters.

Authoritarian populism sustains majoritarian assent despite deep economic crises and rising public dissent in the polls. The literature on explaining how global authoritarianism ascended in the last two decades segued to explore how these regimes are prolonged. Existing works on the lifetime of authoritarian regimes seldom cover the non-institutional and unorganized dynamics that keep them in power. As the popularity of authoritarian regimes grows and they endure longer than expected, scholars are looking to detect the subtle forms and effects that facilitate their reign. This paper examines the role of clashing attitudes toward democracy and the redistribution of symbolic capital in the life and death of authoritarian populist regimes. Drawing from 96 in-depth interviews and a year-long urban bus ethnography in Turkey, this article shows that deepening polarization under authoritarian populism nurtures hybrid meaning-making regarding democracy. Ordinary people discern the meaning of democracy that the official state ideology disseminated from their ideas for democracy that have been molded under the current regime’s ambiguous and unpredictable (un)democratic praxis. Clashing meanings people attach to democracy converge on accepting moderation as better democratic practice. Access to people’s meaning-making shows that populism affectively empowers people by elevating their perceived citizenship status and providing the regime loyalists with symbolic capital. In addition to macro-level structural and economic factors, effective leadership, and social policies, the changing dynamics of everyday life and interaction order can also contribute to prolonged authoritarianism.

Show me your phone!”, “Look at the residences surrounding us; everybody has become a homeowner!”, “Everybody claims there is poverty, but notice the abundance of luxury vehicles traversing our streets!” These remarks vividly illustrate the AKP supporters’ primary defense against critiques of diminishing purchasing power throughout the party's reign in Turkey. I posit that the expanded influence of commercial banks during the AKP era has played a crucial role in shaping these “distorted perceptions” among the party’s conservative base about its economic achievements, which, in turn, has reinforced their support for the AKP’s authoritarian trajectory. The volume of credit distributed by privately owned banks has increased more than sixfold during the AKP's tenure, with a considerable portion directed towards consumer credit schemes and mortgage plans. By boosting the disposable income of lower- and middle-income groups, these financial instruments have enabled these segments of the population to surpass their traditional consumption levels, thereby diminishing their demand for redistribution—a key mechanism that sustains autocratic leaders in power. Utilizing an original survey, I demonstrate that the endurance of the AKP’s authoritarian rule is significantly influenced by the increased access to consumer credit, which has fostered a “distorted perception” of economic well-being and, consequently, increased support for the autocratizing ruling party.