A feminist-phenomenology of women’s activism against hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region

Taking a feminist-phenomenological perspective of the body, this article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the embodied subjectivity of women in the movement against hydropower plants (HPPs) in the culturally and spatially specific context of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Informed by a feminist engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘the body-subject’, ‘the flesh’ and Einfühlung, the article places subjectivity within a relational ontology of sentience and intelligence in which corporeal experiences, senses and affects condition cognitive and agential processes. Bodily senses and affects are thus treated as media of subjectivity. The relationship between water and identity, established through memory, heritage and history, is also produced and/or conserved by the embodied relation between women’s bodies and bodies of water, within the connective ‘flesh’ of the physical world. The case of the Eastern Black Sea demonstrates how political subjectivity of women in the movement against HPPs is conditioned by an intimate embodied relationship with river waters that is sustained by a series of sensory-affective experiences. Their statements emphasize, over and over again, an interconnectedness with the rivers, which makes the cause of anti-HPP struggle vital and urgent for them. This feeling of urgency is a source of women’s radicalism in opposing HPPs. The article maintains the female subject as embodied and transversal, and stresses the centrality of corporeal experience, sense and affect in formation of political subjectivity. By developing a body-centred feminist-phenomenological approach to political subjectivity, it introduces a novel way of analysing women’s activisms within and beyond environmental movements.     

Migration and the built environment: a spatial analysis of resettlement in Çeşme,Turkey

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the retreat of the Ottoman Empire caused a massive scale migration in the Aegean regions. This process was furthered by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) between the Turkish Republic and Greece. Gradually, more than one million people were formally exchanged under the control of the respective national authorities. This study shows that the predictions made by political authorities regarding the expected adaptation and homogenization based on religious affiliations failed to materialize; instead, the process of migration generated its own unique and autonomous processes derived primarily from cultural aspects and social origins. This research examines the materialization of the migrants’ adaptation practices and the spatial transformations in the built environment at both urban and domestic level, in order to indentify spatial and related social conflicts that arose as a result of socio-cultural mixing through a case study of the Çe?me Peninsula, Turkey. The study concludes that the relationship between social space and the physical environment is intertwined, with spatial transformations based on residents’ home of origin, professions and economic prosperity positioned in a clearly defined hierarchy of meaning.     

Trump’s populism: lessons from Latin America

This paper compares left-wing Latin American populism with Donald Trump. Despite their different social bases and economic policies, they use a similar logic to construct politics as an antagonistic struggle between two camps. Left-wing and right-wing populists aim to rupture existing political institutions to give power to the people, yet they differ in how they construct this category. Whereas Trump used ethnic criteria to differentiate the people from three out groups – Mexicans, Muslims, and African-American militant organisations – left-wing Latin American populists used political and socio-economic criteria. Despite their democratising promises, Latin American populists like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador undermined democracy from within. Even though stronger institutions might protect American democracy, Trump has disfigured democracy.