Everyday Scandals & Community Making in Authoritarian Turkey

Umu Türem's research analyzes the everyday complaints that are written and discussed on one of the most popular social media sites in Turkey, Ekşi Sözlük, a collaborative, user-generated platform. Since 2014, there has been a massive increase in a particular genre of minor complaints and grievances on Ekşi Sözlük, often identified as “scandals (“rezalet”s) by the contributing authors. Given that this period is now commonly associated with the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey, what does the parallel rise and fluctuation of a culture of scandal tell us about the process of autocratization? To answer these questions, he employs a three-part theoretical framework, focusing on: 1) the political sociology of authoritarianism in Turkey and beyond, 2) the politics of complaint-making and minor grievances, and 3) the formation of affective political communities in the digital world. His objective is to study Ekşi Sözlük’s concrete archive of grievances and complaints to analyze the politics of resentment in an increasingly authoritarian regime. His first hypothesis is that in increasingly authoritarian settings where political and economic frustrations are on the rise yet cannot be articulated via regular routes, their articulation shifts to non-political everyday injustices, such as consumer complaints. The articulation of these ordinary injustices constitutes an outlet for voicing political discontent. His secondly hypothesis is that online complaints and their broader genre bring to life an affective public space and a political community. Such affective spaces are crucial in sustaining deep currents of dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regime, particularly among groups that are not affiliated with a particular party or political movement.

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Umut Türem is a sociologist with a PhD from the Institute for Law and Society of the New York University. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Departments of Education and Near Eastern Studies of the University of Vienna. His main areas of interest are sociology of law, international/global political economy, and "the state" as a theoretical and empirical object of research. His latest research examines authoritarian political formations and their legal and socio-economic foundations, particularly in the semi peripheries of global political economy (such as Turkey).