Tuğçe Özdemir

This project aims for a more nuanced, empirically grounded analysis of political and social change in Turkey in the wake of the AKP’s rise to power in 2002. It takes Turkish family politics, which are of high symbolic significance for the negotiation of the boundaries between religion and the secular in Turkey, as a showcase for the recent transformation.

This project employs a perspective on governance that conceives of state politics and societal developments as part of one intrinsically connected process. I therefore combine analysis of the policies of the AKP government in the domains of family, and the ideals and rationales driving them, with a micro-level investigation of what individuals from various socio-politically and religio-culturally specific milieus experience as the pressing issues in these domains.