In 2005, a Turkish woman was shot dead by her son in an 'honour killing' for appearing on a popular women's talk show on television. The show invited ordinary women from lower socio-economic classes to speak of their experiences of family life: marriage, divorce, child custody rights and relations with in-laws. Here, Solen Sanli examines the diversification of mass media in Turkey following liberalization in the 1980s. Specifically looking at popular women's talk shows ("Woman's Voice" Television), she explores the way in which groups with political and cultural power control public discourse and the public sphere in Turkey, and how urban/rural and Islamist/secular oppositions play out. Sanli traces the development of mass media in Turkey, particularly television, and closely examining how narrations of violence against women are presented. "Women and Cultural Citizenship in Turkey" contains rigorous, topical and original insights relevant for a range of disciplines, such as Anthropology, Gender and Communication Studies, as well as those researching cultural and political participation in the Middle East.

This text examines the diversification of mass media in Turkey following liberalisation in the 1980s. Specifically looking at popular women's talk shows, it explores the way in which groups with political and cultural power control public discourse and the public sphere in Turkey.

In 2005, a Turkish woman was shot dead by her son in an 'honour killing' for appearing on a popular women's talk show on television. The show invited ordinary women from lower socio-economic classes to speak of their experiences of family life: marriage, divorce, child custody rights and relations with in-laws. Here, Solen Sanli examines the diversification of mass media in Turkey following liberalization in the 1980s. Specifically looking at popular women's talk shows ("Woman's Voice" Television), she explores the way in which groups with political and cultural power control public discourse and the public sphere in Turkey, and how urban/rural and Islamist/secular oppositions play out. Sanli traces the development of mass media in Turkey, particularly television, and closely examining how narrations of violence against women are presented. "Women and Cultural Citizenship in Turkey" contains rigorous, topical and original insights relevant for a range of disciplines, such as Anthropology, Gender and Communication Studies, as well as those researching cultural and political participation in the Middle East.

An ethnographic exploration of the meaning of national citizenship in the context of globalization The American Passport in Turkey explores the diverse meanings and values that people outside of the United States attribute to U.S. citizenship, specifically those who possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship while residing in Turkey. Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta interviewed more than one hundred individuals and families and, through their narratives, shed light on how U.S. citizenship is imagined, experienced, and practiced in a setting where everyday life is marked by numerous uncertainties and unequal opportunities. When a Turkish mother wants to protect her daughter's modern, secular upbringing through U.S. citizenship, U.S. citizenship, for her, is a form of insurance for her daughter given Turkey's unknown political future. When a Turkish-American citizen describes how he can make a credible claim of national belonging because he returned to Turkey yet can also claim a cosmopolitan Western identity because of his U.S. citizenship, he represents the popular identification of the West with the United States. And when a natural-born U.S. citizen describes with enthusiasm the upward mobility she has experienced since moving to Turkey, she reveals how the status of U.S. citizenship and "Americanness" become valuable assets outside of the States. Offering a corrective to citizenship studies where discussions of inequality are largely limited to domestic frames, Altan-Olcay and Balta argue that the relationship between inequality and citizenship regimes can only be fully understood if considered transnationally. Additionally, The American Passport in Turkey demonstrates that U.S. global power not only reveals itself in terms of foreign policy but also manifests in the active desires people have for U.S. citizenship, even when they do not intend to live in the United States. These citizens, according to the authors, create a new kind of empire with borders and citizen-state relations that do not map onto recognizable political territories.

Alevis have been struggling for the right of recognition and equal citizenship in Turkey for decades. Alevi media enables a particular form of transversal citizenship. Emre presents Alevia media for the first time, demonstrating the flourishing of ethno-religious imaginaries through community media.

“A fresh study that confirms the existence of multiple peripheries (and its others) in Turkish society and how dominant centrist media represented these differences in film and television discourse. The use of Mardin’s center-periphery concept for the analyses of films, ads and cartoons is brilliant. This is a timely project as scholarly interest in Turkey has increased exponentially since 2013. This project is key to understanding the roots of a media politics in contemporary Turkey.” —Murat Akser, Ulster University, UK “Alparslan Nas' seminal work disrupts the notion of Turkish identities as fixed and stable. He challenges the center (secular, modern, Western)/ peripheral (conservative, religious) binary by critically examining how a cultural “other” is constructed and performed through the media in Turkey. Nas’ analysis offers a (much needed) new lens and approach to understanding Turkey’s complex social and political landscape.” —Kathleen Cavanaugh, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland This book is an important contribution to the scholarship on Turkey’s cultural and political dynamics, facilitating a discussion on the recent depictions of the cultural other in the media. Turkey’s modern history has been characterized by a particular tension between the social classes occupying the “center” of society: while the bureaucratic elite are represented as modern, secular and westernized, the “peripheral” communities are portrayed as conservative, religious or non-Turkish. This book facilitates a timely intervention to problematize this possible perception and to point at the complex dynamics of center-periphery relations through the representation of the cultural other in film, television, advertisements and cartoons, which have all been produced by different social classes. Ultimately, Media Representations of the Cultural Other in Turkey argues that the notions of the center and periphery do not signify stable positions; rather, each social agent imagines themselves at the center, the cultural other at their periphery providing a crucial tool for the realization of their own identity.