2014 12(2)
Ankara Üniversitesi ‹letişim Araşt›rmalar› ve Uygulama Merkezi
iletiim : arat›rmalar› Dergisi
Center for Communication Research Ankara University
communication : research Journal iletiim : arat›rmalar› Ankara
Üniversitesi ‹letişim Araşt›rmalar› ve Uygulama Merkezi taraf›ndan ç›kar›lan hakemli bir dergidir. Derginin amac› iletişim alan›n›n disiplinleraras› yap›s› içinde düşünce üreten araşt›rmac›lar için uluslararas› bir forum oluşturmak; teorik analiz ve tart›şmalar kadar ampirik araşt›rmalar› yay›nlayarak iletişim alan›nda bilgi/veri üretiminin sa¤lanmas›na katk›da bulunmak; kitap ve araşt›rma raporlar› ile ulusal ve uluslararas› konferans ve kongrelerin de¤erlendirilmesini yapmakt›r. Bu amaçlar› gerçekleştirmek için derginin kendini konumlad›¤› s›n›r bilimsellik, akla uygun olmak ve eleştirelliktir. iletiim :
arat›rmalar› y›lda iki kez, Nisan ve
Kas›m aylar›nda yay›nlan›r. Dergi Türkçe, ‹ngilizce, Almanca ve Frans›zca dillerinde yaz›lm›ş yaz›lara yer verir. Hakemli bir derginin gere¤i olarak gönderilen yaz›lar, yazar›n kimli¤ini bilmeyen uzman hakemler taraf›ndan de¤erlendirmeye al›n›r.
communication : research is a
refereed academic journal published by the Center for Communication Research Ankara University. The journal seeks to establish an international forum for communication researchers within the interdisciplinary field of communication studies; to contribute to the production of knowledge and data by publishing theoretical analyses as well as empirical research; and to assess national and international meetings in addition to publishing book and research report reviews. In order to attain these goals, the journal identifies its extent as the limits marked by scientificity,
accountability, and critical thinking.
communication : research is
published twice a year in April and October. Journal’s languages of publication are Turkish, English, French and German. Submissions are sent out to anonymous referees for blind review.
Sahibi Publisher
Ankara Üniversitesi İletişim Araştırmaları ve Uygulama Merkezi (İLAUM) ad›na
Prof. Dr. Nuran Yıldız, Müdür
Yay›n Dan›ma Kurulu Advisory Board
Nilgün Abisel Yakın Do¤u Üniversitesi Korkmaz Alemdar Lefke Avrupa Üniversitesi Aysel Aziz İstanbul Yeni Yüzyıl Üniversitesi Seçil Büker Gazi Üniversitesi
Stuart Ewen The City University of New York (Hunter Collage)
Raşit Kaya Orta Do¤u Teknik Üniversitesi Metin Kazanc› Ankara Üniversitesi Levent K›l›ç Anadolu Üniversitesi Mehmet Küçükkurt Gazi Üniversitesi Alois Moosmüller Münih Ludwig Maximilian
Üniversitesi (Almanya) Vincent Mosco Queen’s University
(Ottawa, Kanada) Filiz B. Pelteko¤lu Marmara Üniversitesi Dan Schiller Illinois Universitesi, ABD Oya Tokgöz Ankara Üniversitesi Ahmet Tolungüç Başkent Üniversitesi Ayd›n U¤ur Bilgi Üniversitesi Dilruba Çatalbaş Ürper Galatasaray Üniversitesi Konca Yumlu Ege Üniversitesi
Editörler Kurulu Editorial Board Editör Editor Engin Sarı
Editör Yardımcıları Beris Artan Editor Assistants Kevser Akyol
Tasar›m Design m. Sobac›
‹letiim Adresi Contact Address
Ankara Üniversitesi ‹letişim Araşt›rmalar› ve Uygulama Merkezi Center for Communication Research Ankara University
Cebeci, 06590, Ankara • Turkey Tel Phone (+90.312) 319 77 14
Faks Fax (+90.312) 362 27 17
E-Mail ilefdrg@media.ankara.edu.tr http:// ilefdergi.ilef.net
ISSN 1303-7900
iletiim : arat›rmalar› dergisi Ankara Üniversitesi ‹letişim Araşt›rmalar› ve Uygulama Merkezi taraf›ndan yay›nlanmaktad›r. © 2014 iletiim : arat›rmalar›. Tüm haklar› sakl›d›r. communication : research journal is published by Center for Communication Research Ankara University.
© 2014 communication : research. All rights reserved. Baskı: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi
İncitaşı Sokak No: 10 Beşevler 06510 Ankara Tel: (0.312) 213 66 55
İçindekiler
5
Gül Karagöz Kızılca From the Editor
Articles
13
Gülhan Balsoy Ottoman Pronatalism in Printed Sources
in Late Nineteenth Century
41
Serpil Atamaz The Formation Of A Counter Public Through
Women’s Press In The Late Ottoman Empire
73
Todd M. Goehle Media, Memory, and Activism:
Rudi Dutschke and the Politics of
Commemorating West Germany’s New Left
109
Ayşe Çavdar The Watch Movement:
Searching Justice for Workers and its Families
Conference Report
131
Beris Artan Özoran The Fifth Storytelling:
Global Reflections on Narrative Conference
4 • iletişim : araşt›rmalar›
Book Review
137
Gülden Gürsoy Ataman Human Rights Journalism:
Advances in Reporting Distant
Humanitarian Interventions
143
This issue of İletişim Araştırmaları (Communication Studies) is entitled Media, Public(s), and Counter-Public(s). As suggested by the title, the issue addresses the ways in which varied publics use media and how media is used to form publics and counter-publics. In his widely know book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Jürgen Habermas views the public sphere as a location where “the press mediates between state and society” (Habermas, 1989:15). For media studies scholars, Habermas’ perspective is to some extent valuable, since he argues that the press and the public simplified the exchange of information in a social setting in which the public participated in political action and mobilization.
However, scholars across many disciplines have criticized Habermas’ conceptualization of the public. For example, Geoff Eley has persuasively argued that Habermas limits the public to the bourgeoisie and its public sphere (Eley, 303).1 Furthermore, for Habermas, public opinion is exclusively associated with the literate public, particularly in its eighteenth century European context. Additionally, Habermas’ definition ignores the “possibility of the existence of public opinion” in non-European societies (Kırlı, 200:258). The concept of the public is related to the questions of power, control, and exclusion, yet Habermas’ concept excludes a variety of social
From the Editor
5
iletiim : arat›rmalar› • © 2014 • 12(2): 5-11
6 • iletiim : aratırmaları
groups, classes, and gendered subjects, scholars from diverse disciplines have revised the term. Therefore, without repudiating the validity of the public sphere as an analytical tool to understand a society, the new literature on the concept has been released from the constraints of Habermas’ limited definition. Furthermore, as Craig Calhoun elaborately argued about the relationships between publics and the media, the consequences of the mass media were not “uniformly negative”. Specifically, he stresses the possibility of many groups within a public who are able to exert influence on the mass media to establish alternative public spheres as well as to create their own political interventions (1992: 37). Therefore, as Calhoun suggests, it is possible to argue that there is a certain amount of room to maneuver for “alternative democratic media strategies” (Calhoun, 1992: 33). In such a context, the articles in this issue aim to show the formation of publics as well as counterpublics.
In this issue, you will read four important articles that discuss the ways in which varied media outlets and actors attempt to create their own public spheres both in European and non-European countries in historical perspectives. In particular, while Gülhan Balsoy shows how different printed products were utilized to reproduce mainstream and therefore officially approved discourses, Todd Goehle, Ayşe Çavdar, and Serpil Atamaz in their respective articles argue the possibility and existence of counter publics that are created by dissidents of their societies in different contexts, dates, and countries.
In the first article of the issue, based on the close reading of diverse Ottoman printed sources Gülhan Balsoy focuses on the matter of Ottoman pronatalism and subjects related to midwifery, pregnancy, and abortion that concerned the editors of print outlets in the second half of the nineteenth century. More specifically, Balsoy argues that, with the development of Ottoman print culture, books as well as journals and newspaper articles advocating pronatalist ideals became widespread when these publications targeted popular audience beside the elites. Balsoy asserts that the normative literature played an important role for popularizing pronatalist ideals as well as medical
Karagöz Kızılca • Editör’den • 7
knowledge. By focusing on publications about pronatalist debates in relation to midwifery, abortion, and pregnancy, Balsoy shows how the Ottoman print media was used to form a public that confirmed and reproduced the mainstream ideas on the Ottoman population in general and pronatalist ideas in particular. Accordingly, “journals, newspapers, advice books, or popular fictions, regardless of their type, shared the idea that the magnitude of the population was the precondition of the strength of the economy and the military”. Balsoy’s research is significant not only because it outlines the ways in which pronatalist writers promote mainstream discources on welfare and progress to construct “a modern state” but also because the article elaborately shows how burgeoning yet diverse media was utilized to confirm rather the state’s perspectives on population related issues. The article is also significant contribution to Ottoman history as well as media studies fields. From a gendered perspective, Balsoy convincingly shows media could be one of the main vehicles to reproduce mainstream ideas and hence public(s).
By focusing on Ottoman journals, newspapers, and women authors’ writings that were published after the 1908 Revolution, the second article, by Serpil Atamaz, shows how “in the absence of formal political incorporation through suffrage” a subordinated group -Ottoman women- utilized the press to define new gender roles as well as to mobilize public opinion around their very own interests. Atamaz stresses that, beginning from the mid-nineteenth century, mostly men utilized the mainstream press and the newly emerging women’s journals to promote new type of gender roles that supported their idea of modern Ottoman women and hence the Ottoman society. However, Atamaz argues that the imagined and expected roles of Ottoman women that were defined by men came to an end with the 1908 Revolution. Post-revolutionary women’s publications promoted an alternative and independent identity that differed from not only the conventional Ottoman women but also the modern Ottoman women represented in the mainstream publications. Accordingly, women writers defined education as a basic right while their male counterparts conceived the significance of education was for creating their ideal,
8 • iletiim : aratırmaları
modern society. In the meantime, the Ottoman women’s press needed to argue against conservatives who circulated the idea that women’s employment would lead to the downfall of the gendered order and of the Islamic community. Therefore, in the process of demanding new rights and creating a public realm to disseminate the counter discourses of Ottoman women, the press became an important vehicle for groups who defended women’s rights. In her article, by utilizing many examples derived from women’s publications, Atamaz convincingly shows that in the post-revolutionary period, Ottoman women developed and circulated “oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” and changed the parameters of politics on women by challenging the dominant and mainstream public discourses on women. Furthermore, Atamaz’s article brings forth a class perspective to women studies in Ottoman history by arguing that the educated and urban women from middle and upper middle classes constructed a counter public for Ottoman women in general.
In the third article of this issue, Todd Goehle analyzes two subjects which recently have become popular in Turkish academic circles: the construction of collective memory through media as well as the legacy of the radical activism of the New Left and of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany. In his article, Goehle pursues a stimulating yet challenging task. With his case study, Goehle argues that, although the mainstream media was used to construct negative memories about West German leftist movements in the 1970s, spaces existed within the mass media for German activists to combat these images and to develop counter strategies. By utilizing rich archival sources that included the former student leader Rudi Dutschke’s personal letters, Goehle outlines the ways in which Dutschke challenged “the discourse of the dominant, mainstream media which linked the West German New Left of the 1960s with the revolutionary violence and “terrorism” of urban guerrilla outfits throughout the 1970s”. Goehle argues that Dutschke’s aim was to form alternative memories of 1960s activism since the mainstream media outlets in the West Germany portrayed the student activism of the period as violent and politically incoherent. Indeed, the reason behind for such a claim for the West Germany’s
Karagöz Kızılca • Editör’den • 9
mass media was to form a negative image about the urban guerrilla activism of the 1970s as well as to dismiss the reformist calls of burgeoning social movements including the Greens. Therefore, media outlets first attempted to create negative collective memories about the 1960s that led to the rearrangement of the memory about the New Left and the omission of details about the student movement. In so doing, the mainstream media attempted to construct a new version of the facts and events, pushing aside the accuracy so as to produce new relationships between authority and public. By scrutinizing Rudi Dutschke’s post-New Left activism as well as the depiction of leftist movements in the West German media outlets, Goehle shows how Dutschke combated negative memories of the New Left past found in the press. More importantly, Goehle shows that Dutschke conceived of the mainstream media as a crucial institution to shape public opinion and to reify status-quo attitudes, ideologies, and memories about radical activism. Therefore, Goehle’s article is significant to understand how mainstream media can unintentionally afford spaces for groups to voice and produce “counter-hegemonic narratives that can help further the causes of social movements.”
The last article of this issue concerns the Watch Movement of mourning families who lost their relatives in workplace accidents. Journalist and free lance researcher Ayşe Çavdar’s article differs from the first three articles methodologically as well as on the time period she focuses on for her research. In this article, Çavdar analyzes a current and unresolved problem of Turkey that escalated under the Justice and Development Party’s government: workplace accidents or, as Çavdar suggests, workplace murders. In her article, Çavdar first examines how the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government implamented neoliberal economic policies for its targeted economic development. However, Çavdar asserts that the implamation of the neoliberal policies succeded due to continued changes in the legal, economic, and political structures of Turkey. Accordingly, the de-unionization process of workers and the privitazition of public sectors by the coup d’etat of 1980 facilitated the policies of AKP that would pave the way for increased workplace accidents. Çavdar shows
10 • iletiim : aratırmaları
that, although the AKP inherited neolibearal policies, it intentionally made necessary adjustments not for the workers’ safety and wellness but rather for the interests of the capital. Nonethless, as Çavdar’s case study suggests, the families who lost their relatives in workplace accidents formed a movement called “the Watch for Conscience and Justice” to protest the government’s responses as well as policies towards the accidents. Furthermore, the families aimed at making the accidents more visible by calling for the public’s attention. In such a way, as Çavdar suggests, the Watch for Conscience and Justice Movement formed a realm for families who were unable to represent and to voice their opinions in the mainstream media. Çavdar shows that the movement indeed is proving succesful for altering public discourse about workplace accidents as well as for questioning neo-liberal economic policies by exposing their consequences.
Supplementing these four articles is Beris Artan’s report on the The Fifth Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative conference that took place in Lisbon, Portugal between 10 and 13 May 2014. Additionally, Gülden Gürsoy Ataman reviews Ibrahim Sega Shaw’s Human Rights Journalism: Advances in Reporting Distant Humanitarian Interventions. Significant in that it focuses on the role of the media and journalism in the protection and the promotion of human rights. Gürsoy Ataman stresses Shaw’s monograph is the first one that analyzes “the conceptualization of human rights journalism on the basis of the reporting of physical, structural and cultural violence within the context of humanitarian intervention”.
For the publication of this issue, I would like to express my special thanks to Nuran Yıldız, manager of the Communication Research Center, for offering me the opportunity to edit this volume of İletişim Araştırmaları Dergisi (Communication Studies Journal). I also would like to thank Engin Sarı and Mehmet Sobacı for their valuable help and suggestions with the issue as well as the authors for submitting their intriguing and stimulating works to the journal. Last but not least, I wish to thank each peer reviewer who generously shared his/her constructive comments with the authors.
Karagöz Kızılca • Editör’den • 11
References
Calhoun, Craig (ed.) (1992). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Eley, Geoff (1992). “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public
Sphere, (ed.) Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Habermas, Jurgen (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press.
Kırlı, Cengiz. (2000) “The struggle over space: coffeehouses of Ottoman Istanbul, 1780-1845”. Unpublished Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton.
Endnote
1 For Habermas, public sphere was only composed of public of private bourgeois people. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 51.
