The murder of a 20 year-old student --Ozgecan Aslan-- in an attempted rape in February of 2015 caused an uproar and nationwide protests in Turkey. The political polarization of the country along the lines of secular Kemalists and conservative Islamists ignited the outrage for Ozgecan’s situation further helping the issue of violence against women to occupy a central space in the public sphere for weeks through street protests, social media campaigns and numerous newspapers commentaries. Through a critical discourse analysis of the stark differences in the coverage of Aslan’s rape and murder among liberal and conservative newspapers, this paper will illustrate how the patriarchal discourse of the male dominated, partisan mainstream journalism ended up framing the event as an opportunity to either support or criticize the current conservative and Islamist government. I argue that Aslan’s murder and the issue of increased violence against women in the past decade was used by liberal media commentators and columnists to criticize the conservative family and gender policies of the current government while conservative media outlets, which are pro-government, used Aslan’s murder both as a moral tale about the importance of a devout, humble life devoid of consumerism and similar temptations that encourage lewd behavior, and as an example of the type of constant attacks they receive from the liberal media due to their political and religious convictions. While patriarchy was not seen or addressed as a root problem for rape, Ozgecan Aslan ended up becoming a polarized and tragic symbol of either the consequence of western modernity or conservative Islamism depending on the ideological composition of the media outlet in question.

The convergence of multiple trajectories in media, communication technologies and everyday politics converges in Al Jazeera’s new digital media project, AJ+ Araby — which delivers short, punchy, editorial videos through apps and social media platforms — a novelty in the region. Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news network seeks to use AJ+ Araby to revitalize a brand heavily diminished by perceptions of bias and a loss of standing in a region (despite high ratings). What was once the buzzing new media of satellite television has become old media. The distributional technologies of satellite allowed a convergence of national public spheres, a regionalization tat transcended state authorities — an media technological environment Al Jazeera exploited to become a center of mediated political life in the region at its height, as Marc Lynch argued (2006). Today’s new media included smart phones, which connect citizens to media with even greater rapidity and intensity. In other contexts, the mobility of news media has been related to new sorts of political mobilities, from flash publics to ad hoc demonstrations — or fleeting collective action. In the context of AJ’s struggle with old institutional politics, from the dominance inside the newsroom of partisans and the greater controls of the foreign ministry that have rendered it an instrument of foreign policy, AJ+ Araby taps into these new mobilities, in particular, by appealing to Arab youth. Do the mobile attributes of their hardware devices direct AJ+ Araby’s content in such fleeting directions, as technological determinism and post-modernism might suggest, or does its output sustain longer political narratives consistent with core themes of Arab political identity? This question matters for both AJ as an institution and the prospects of maintaining a regional Arab publicness, as the channel began to do. This question is furthered through interviews with AJ+ Araby employees and a content analysis of its output — the first of its kind.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, symbolic struggles over the relationship between the neoliberal form of modernity and personal car ownership created complex discourses that brought together social and political theories, urban studies, geography and psychology. Starting from the mid-twentieth century, cars emerged as symbols of modernity, wealth, social segregation, Western ideals of mobility and freedom in the Middle East. Thus, personal car ownership became an important currency in determining class relations and the interactions between individuals in the public sphere. In Iran, the Pahlavi State’s vision of modernity that centralized authority around secular infrastructures invited Western firms to develop a significant automotive industry until the Islamic Revolution. Despite the fluctuations in the car production market between the 60s and 90s, Iran has re-developed its domestic car industry over the past few decades, becoming the fastest growing car industry in the region. In addition to the visible, physical impact that the car has had on road-making and urban design, the easy availability of automobiles re-shaped the experiences of space, distance and time, addressing more subjective responses to desires, emotions and consumer tendencies. Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, filmmakers who are commonly identified with the Iranian New Wave movement, experimented with the aesthetic possibilities of the moving car-space in their films Taste of Cherry (1997) and Taxi Tehran (2015) respectively. In Kiarostami’s minimalist fable of fate, the middle-aged main character Badii drives his private car around the outskirts of Tehran in order to find someone to bury his body after he commits suicide. Throughout the movie, Badii recruits several people for the job, all of whom share the car-space with him as passengers and talk about the religious injunctions against suicide in Islam. In Panahi’s recent Taxi Tehran, the director drives around the bustling city of Tehran in disguise as a taxi driver, engaging in political, intellectual and everyday conversations with his passengers. This paper will present a comparative analysis of the social satire in these internationally acclaimed movies to show how the interior space of the moving car transforms into a plot-generating device by segregating the modern individual from the social world. It will contrast the aestheticization of the car interior as a space to negotiate peculiar pathos about the modern human condition with the earlier symbolic perception of cars as fetishized objects of modernity.

“Artifacts have politics” (Winner 1986). This political charge gives artifacts a role in regulating the social space, enabling certain types of interactions while disabling others either through the artifact’s material instrumentality (Cowan 1983, Winner 1986, Wajcman 1991, Latour 1992) or its role as a communicative symbol. As a representation, an artifact can act as the physical manifestations of a social or political accomplishment. Power relations are entailed in all representational practices (Hall 1985). “Any given representation is itself a social relation, linked to the group understandings, status hierarchies, resistances, and conflicts that exist in other spheres of the culture in which it circulates” (Greenblatt, 1991, p. 6). As conceptualized in Bourdieu’s notions of ‘symbolic goods’ (1985) and ‘symbolic power’ (1991), representations are not only products but producers, reifying unconscious modes of domination on conscious subjects and thereby decisively altering the very forces that brought them into being. Departing from this literature, this presentation traces the power relations in Turkey’s efforts for defense-industrial indigenization under the AKP government. Since the late Ottoman Empire, the military-bureaucracy has viewed itself as a "great modernizing force—the vanguard of society— imbued with organizational capacity and the technology of the West” (Cook, 2007: 15). This ‘modernizing mission’ was the grundnorm that legitimized the military-bureaucracy’s claim to political autonomy—"only those with the type of specialized skills [required for high modernism]—that is to say themselves—had a mandate to exercise political power” (Cook, 2007: 15). The centerpiece of this modernizing mission was rapid industrialization and its artifacts—like Arcelik refrigerators and domestically-assembled Anadol automobiles (Bozdogan and Akcan 2012)—served as the physical manifestation of the successes of the Kemalist regime’s industrialization campaign (106). Ilkin (1993) and Gole (1993) also documented how the businessmen and engineers driving this effort were incorporated into the elite structure. AKP government’s ambitious plans for defense-industrial indigenization are an appropriation of the ‘modernizing mission’ that the Kemalist establishment legitimized itself by. Since the Ottoman times, building an indigenous and self-sufficient defense industry has been the primary object of the Turkish modernization (Agoston 2008). By appropriating this discourse, the AKP government is delegitimizing a status quo that systematically excluded it from the political realm since 1923, expanding the country’s material power in a way that reinforces the government’s aspirations for regional power, creating new sources of patronage for to appease the elites, and building a populist discourse that sustains its political appeal.