This paper explores the ways in which a new form of urban transformation takes place in Istanbul’s upper-middle income neighborhoods, where urban rent is increasing through demolition and reconstruction of residential buildings with the aim of earthquake proofing. More specifically, this paper focuses on the experience of this transformation among doormen as an occupational group, most of whom are migrants from Anatolia and live rent-free in the basement floors with their families in return of their minimum-wage paying work serving as building superintendents. In the recent wave of urban transformation, while the homeowners receive rent support during the period of reconstruction and are relocated back to their renewed buildings, the doormen face displacement and unemployment, as the new apartment managements prefer to outsource security and cleaning services to private companies. Despite a growing body of urban literature on transformation and gentrification in Istanbul, there has been little empirical work on the experience of transformation in residential upper-middle income neighborhoods. Aiming to shift focus to a rather overlooked form of displacement in Istanbul, this paper illustrates the peripheral position of the doormen within central Istanbul. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews with doormen in Istanbul, this paper displays spatial exclusion of an occupational group from central urban geographies through new forms of transformation that reproduce poverty and displacement. Urban transformation, from which homeowners and contractors jointly profit and prosper, impacts doormen as an occupational group adversely: Doormen’s precarious position is defined through attachment of their labor to their homes. Doormen face the risk to lose their jobs and thus homes, are not offered any safety, they are pushed further into the peripheries of the labor market, of the city, or even of the country as they no longer can afford to live in Istanbul with a minimum wage and hence move back to their villages in Anatolia.

We examine the role social media use may play in increasing the chances that violent repression of protest will backfire. Prior research demonstrates that violent repression can either decrease protest participation through raising the costs of participation, or can generate outrage, resulting in “backfire” and an increase in mobilization. Many recent mass mobilizations have garnered attention from scholars and journalists alike as instances of repression backfiring and because of the widespread use of social media in these mobilizations. We make a case for why these two trends may be related and use logistic regression analysis on data from the Turkish Gezi Movement in summer 2013 to examine this relationship. We find supportive evidence for a causal relation between being recruited to participate in the protests through social media and joining the mass mobilization as a reaction to police repression.

This paper examines the ways in which the Turkish government addresses and attempts to govern youth in the face of growing dissent. In a series of controversial speeches in 2012, the then Prime Minister Erdoğan declared that their goal is to bring up religious youth. The prime minister's declaration garnered a strong reaction from the society. The protests in the Summer of 2013 helped crystallize the governing Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) growing anxieties about controlling young people. During the protests, we witnessed the state officials’ systematic efforts to discredit, criminalize and repress young protestors. This paper investigates not the repressive tools but the ideological ones in the management of youth masses. It looks at high school essay competitions that the government devised in the aftermath of the protests. These competitions focus on important Ottoman military victories such as the Conquest of Istanbul or the Dardanalles Campaign and mobilized students to think and write about the significance of these campaigns and their military leaders. The competitions are followed by extravagant award ceremonies, where students were awarded lavishly with gold coins, vacation vouchers and other big and small gifts. Although these competitions seem to focus on historical themes and in that sense can be read as yet another case of the AKP’s politics of history, the paper argues that there is more to the story in the ways in which the essay competitions also serve as a device to create a discursive field that helped the government rationalize and legitimize its controversial practices concerning urban reconstruction and political transformation. Finally, the paper analyzes the intersections of politics of history and politics of future in governing youth in Turkey.

This paper compares the digital divide within and between Turkey and the U.S. by employing the cross-country analysis. The primary interest in this study is to address the significant steps for policy makers to bridge the internal gaps. The digital divide is defined as the “gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels with regard both to their opportunities to access [Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)] and to their use of the Internet for a wide variety of activities” (OECD, 2001). By December of 2015, 3.2 billion people were globally using the Internet, of which 2 billion were residing in developing countries. However, 4 billion people from developing countries (i.e., 2/3 of the population residing in developing countries) remain offline (Data, I.C.T., 1). As it occurred in other developed countries, students-per-computer ratios remained 10:1 in the U.S. (Pedro, et al., iv), where the Department of Education and related governmental organizations have invested in ICTs in their implementations of policy decisions. This is to ensure widespread access to the Internet and to remove barriers to computer literacy especially for young generations (Mapping, 9). Similar efforts are also evident in Turkey—a developing country, where the government considers its young generation as “a driving force” for economic progress and technological transformation (Pouezevara, et al., 5). In this quantitative study, we performed a cross-country analysis using the two public data from: (1) the Turkish Statistical Institute, and (2) the American Community Survey. By employing cross-country analysis, we look at the (global) digital divide to answer whether policy parameters of Turkey and the U.S. are separate and distinct in their implementations, and if so, to what extent. The main purpose of this study is to address the significant steps to bridge the internal gaps, which in turn help the country eliminate power inequality, and create well-connected and collaborative students, educators, parents and communities that is necessary for social transformation in a civic society of the 21st century. Works Cited Data, I. C. T. "Statistics Division, Telecommunication Development Bureau, International Telecommunication Union." The World in 2013, ICT Facts and Figures. (2015). “Mapping the Digital Divide.” Council of Economic Advisers Issue Brief (2015): 1-10. Web. OECD. “Understanding the digital divide.” (2001). Pouezevara, Sarah, et al. "Turkey's FATIH project: A plan to conquer the digital divide or a technological leap of faith." Turkey: RTI International & Education Reform Initiative (ERI) (2003).