Scholars who study deliberative democracy put a lot emphasis on the importance of political talk. The way people talk about politics shape and reflect how they think about politics as well as how they practice politics. Talking politics is also a discursive act, which is closely tied to the discussions of political engagement. There is, however, an important concern when it comes to the analysis of political talk that people talk about politics with like-minded individuals creating echo chambers. Their boundaries are heavily guarded by group dynamics. As the scholar who support echo chambers argument suggest deliberative talk is quite rare especially in overtly political pages. However, we can also find deliberative talk in non-political pages. The literature on deliberation has a tendency to talk about it as an outcome, focuses on exclusively political venues and relies heavily on research settings like forums, focus groups. In doing so it understudies the political talk that takes place in non-political settings. Consequently in this paper I focus on the question of how we come across political discourse on a predominantly non-political platform on Social Network Sites. In order to answer that question I focused on top 50 most popular public Facebook pages from Turkey. I collected Facebook comments between September-December 2012 by selecting five random days. I located the posts made on these select dates and downloaded all the comments made on these posts allowing for a week lag so that I did not cut an ongoing conversation. I downloaded 430 posts in total and coded over 80.000 comments. If the comments were political, I coded these comments for the presence or absence of the following characteristics: encouragement of deliberative talk, civility, outrage, and us/them distinctions. For the analysis of this data, I pursued a mixed methods approach. In order to demonstrate the relationships and general trends among and within the Facebook page types (entertainment, sports and political) I used multinomial logistic regression and made a comment-level analysis. I aimed to demonstrate the characteristics of comments in relation to whether the comment is encouraging, discouraging or neutral in terms of deliberative talk. This quantitative analysis is followed by a qualitative conversation analysis of the data. Based on these analyses, I argue that contrary to the expectations in literature we might see a different kind of deliberative talk in some seemingly non-political venues, a rowdy one on sports pages.

Late marriages, rising divorce rates, and women outnumbering their male counterparts on university campuses are among the most striking indicators of major shifts in the position of women and the family in contemporary Iran. In the post-revolutionary state, where officially sanctioned discourses have largely addressed women’s roles and rights in terms relating to family, marriage, and motherhood, these changes constitute a crisis. To address this crisis and to re-frame discourses on women, the Iranian state has provided substantial support for the production of material that emphasizes the essential links between women and family. This support is evident in the rise of book publications, television show forums, and public declarations (including by Ayatollah Khamenei himself) about women. Recognizing the influence of New Media in general and the online successes of dissenting voices in particular, state actors and supporters have supplemented the explosion in offline material about women and the family with digital sites for promoting similar content. With a focus on New Media, this paper interrogates such attempts to define and circumscribe discourses on women within frameworks pertaining to the family. Drawing from online venues dedicated to women’s issues (such as Mehrkhane, a “news and analysis site on women and the family,” and Charghad, which describes itself as a site for the “Muslim Iranian Girl”), the paper also highlights the internal inconsistencies of conservative discourses on women and examines the reasons why these sites have been unable to garner popular participation. In addition, the paper argues that the push to redirect the conversations about women must be understood not only in relation to the changing status of women and marriage but must also be placed in a broader context where the state’s views and policies on women are constantly being challenged by foreign media, reformist and independent activists, as well as by dissenters within the factionalized power establishment.

Since Tunisia’s 2011 uprising, myriad transnational development efforts are underway to rectify the country’s large-scale unemployment predicament. Sparking new business remains a top priority for many of these initiatives, with teaching, mentoring, and coaching resident entrepreneurs widely viewed as a catalyst for economic salvation. Yet Tunisians harbor ambivalent feelings about such interventions: many contest not only the neoliberal morals they are being taught, but the very premise of formal market education as a pathway to consensus and national legitimacy. This paper draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at a formal business school in Tunis to show how insurgent modes of business pedagogy have instantiated radical modes of civic belonging, collaboration, and trust in a newly “liberated” context. Foregrounding the ways in which Tunisian business students and teachers in Tunis have derived personal agency from suspicion and contestation, this paper examines national pedagogy and rebellion at play through the inner workings and actors of formal business education systems. In pre-revolutionary Tunisia, college-level business school degrees were once widely regarded as inferior to their medical and engineering school counterparts. This reality seems at once to reflect and inform latent cultural opinions of entrepreneurship among locals — an inherited legacy, I argue, of the entrepreneur’s historically low cultural capital in colonial France. Yet by documenting the informal techniques and lessons advanced in formal entrepreneurship classes, this paper highlights and challenges traditional assumptions of business school as a Petri dish of autonomy and self expression: in post-revolutionary Tunisia, trust games and "community building" exercises often take precedence over business plan tutorials, and teachers eagerly bring political ethics into lessons on best practice. The ramifications of this formal/informal curriculum begins to show how cultural categories of public belonging and personal agency are transfigured by both the instability of the Tunisian state and changing opinion on what being a legitimate member of society can entail. Ultimately, this ethnographic paper aims to trace the roles of suspicion and belonging in post-revolutionary Tunisian business school, and to account for the complex dynamics shaping aspiring Tunisian entrepreneurs while cementing their identities as members of a legitimate state. I argue that parallel desires for agency and post-revolutionary “belonging” inform entrepreneurship pedagogy in contemporary Tunisia, and call for a reconsideration of the ways we define “starting up” in an era of “starting over.”

What resources are available to young people to prevent the spread of HIV? How can we go about developing culturally appropriate reproductive health care materials and services for young people across the MENA region? The discussion of sexual behavior, even within a medical context, is one of the biggest taboos in the MENA region, which makes the prevention of a sexually transmitted infection like HIV extremely difficult to monitor and treat. There are several cultural issues impeding young people’s education about safe sex, and it is nearly impossible to provide them with the tools to practice it. The prevailing cultural belief in the region is that discussion about reproductive health and sexual habits will lead to an increase in premarital sex, which is forbidden in Islam. The particular cultural emphasis on young women’s innocence and virginity makes seeking reproductive health treatment as an unmarried woman even more problematic. Due to this cultural sensitivity, providing reproductive health services for unmarried youth is a relatively new concept and has not reached its full potential. Jordan represents one of the few countries in the MENA region that has made significant efforts to protect the youth population from the spread of disease. While Jordan is considered to have a low prevalence of HIV, this incidence is on the rise and little research has been done to evaluate the intervention and prevention approaches in place in the country. The methodology for this project will include elite and expert semi-structured interviews with health care workers and administrators at reproductive health clinics, both private and associated with the Ministry of Health, in Jordan in order to survey which strategies have been successful in serving young people’s reproductive health needs, what services and educational materials are available, and how knowledgeable young people appear to be about HIV prevention. Additionally, leading scholars on HIV prevention and youth sexuality in the region will be interviewed concerning the cultural challenges of studying and monitoring the spread of HIV and protecting unmarried youth populations.

The Arab uprisings and the related wave of protests across the globe over the past few years have spurred a revisiting of explanations of protests. Moreover, attempts to reconcile structural conditions with contextual factors animate these debates. In investigating the role of structural factors in causing anti-government protests – namely burgeoning young population and the penetration of information communication technology (ICT) – we attempt to bridge these debates through a mixed method of analysis. At the global level we employ a cross-national, time series analysis between the years 1995 and 2011 to investigate the role and interaction of youth bulges and ICT in explaining the onset and diffusion of anti-government demonstrations. We find that rising numbers of young people who are increasingly connected through information communication technology increase the diffusion of protests. In other words, when the enhanced technological means of protest are fused with the grievance and opportunity-based structural conditions often witnessed in countries with large youth bulges, the proliferation of anti-government demonstrations is multiplicatively heightened. A nuance in our results, however, suggests that it is the proliferation of technology that is more important in explaining protest diffusion. In contrast, we do not find that either of our variables of interest affects the probability of the outbreak of protests. In our global analysis, however, we are unable to do anything more than control for political sources of grievance. In order to demonstrate the significance and impact of these more contextual factors we turn our attention to specific cases from the Middle East from 1995 through 2011– most notably Algeria, Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia. We first analyze the degree of fit of the global model to the specific case. Next, we discuss this variance in terms of national and regional contextual factors and history through a qualitative linkage of socio-political context to the situation of youth populations and ICT in that country that has led to its particular outbreak and persistence of protests. In this manner we seek to highlight the means, motives and opportunities of anti-government demonstrations globally and in regards to the specifics of the Middle East.