The Gezi Protests: Between Carnivalesque and Prefiguration

2022-9-26
Salman, Sinan
Show full item record
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
258
views
268
downloads
This study analyzes the protest forms and practices of social movements built on the practice of occupying public spaces between 2011 and 2013 in the backdrop of the snowballing protest wave that began in 2008. It first traces the concept of carnival in the Bakhtinian perspective to understand how carnivalesque forms in squares revitalize everyday life in festival form and transform it into an opposition dynamic. Second, it examines the prefigurative practices in the squares to explore how prefiguration provides certain mechanisms for producing and reproducing desired social relations. I argue that the articulation of carnivalesque with prefiguration opens cracks since new forms of social relations, new ways of doing, and new ways of life have been established by the accumulation and proliferation of carnivalesque and prefigurative forms. In that regard, I focus on the Gezi Protests to discuss how these protest repertoires negate existing social relations and create alternative visions. This study mainly argues that intertwined spatiality and temporality of carnivalesque and prefiguration as cracks produce a time-space beyond existing relations by reconfiguring everyday life in a way that creates new political possibilities.
social movements, carnivalesque, prefiguration, Gezi Protests
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/99425
Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

Place and protest: the “occupy gezi movement” in Ankara
Şensönmez, Gökhan; Bodirsky, Katharina; Department of Sociology (2016)
This thesis analyzes the occupy movement within the example of Gezi in terms of place and protest. The term occupy movement indicats a contradictory couple of static and dynamic strategies. While the literature attends this new wave of mobilizations through the lens of 'occupy' alone, the essential component 'movement' is neglected. Accordingly, the existing works on Gezi mainly study Gezi Park that overshadows the experiences of a movement spread to nation-scale. To be able to shed light to these experienc...
The transformation of greenpeace: from a new social movement to a moderate social movement organization
Kaya, Rukiy; Bahçecik, Şerif Onur; Department of International Relations (2019)
In this thesis, my argument is that Greenpeace has transformed from a new social movement to a moderate social movement organization (SMO), and it has lost its new social movement features. To understand this transformation, I examine new social movement literature. Firstly, I investigate under what circumstances new social movements emerged, and how the new social movements were in the 70’s and 80’s. Therefore, I summarized the economic, political, and social changes in the 1960s and analyzed how these cha...
A "Magic and Poetic" Moment of Dissensus: Aesthetics and Politics in the June 2013 (Gezi Park) Protests in Turkey
Aytekin, Erden Attila (2017-05-01)
This article departs from analyses that underline the middle-class character of June 2013 (Gezi Park) protests in Turkey by focusing on the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the protest movement. The predominant form of protest in the movement was aesthetic political acts, which did not bring about any distinction based on class or cultural capital. Rather, the artistic practices and cultural symbols employed by protesters bridged gaps by bringing a large and diverse body of people around a co...
The Vortex of Rights: 'Right to the City' at a Crossroads
Kuymulu, Mehmet Barış (Wiley, 2013-05-01)
The right to the city concept has recently attracted a great deal of attention from radical theorists and grassroots activists of urban justice, who have embraced the notion as a means to analyze and challenge neoliberal urbanism. It has, moreover, drawn considerable attention from United Nations (UN) agencies, which have organized meetings and outlined policies to absorb the notion into their own political agendas. This wide-ranging interest has created a conceptual vortex, pulling together discordant poli...
Gezi movement: an analysis in the context of place/space, the discursive practices and the society
Yılmaz, Ayşenur; Cengizkan, Ali; Department of Architecture (2015)
This study aims to analyse the Gezi Movement, emerged in the last days of May 2013 against Taksim Pedestrianization Project which is conceptualized starting in 2007 by İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality and spread to whole country in a record time in June 2013 and lasted effectively for a month and continued during and after the research time, in terms of architecture and the society together with the discourses revealed in this process. The relationships between the society, the place and the places, and t...
Citation Formats
S. Salman, “The Gezi Protests: Between Carnivalesque and Prefiguration,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.
METU IIS - Integrated Information Service open@metu.edu.tr