Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper looks at the ways in which Turkey's security discourses have been shaped by and have, in turn, shaped the transformation Turkey has gone through in recent years. Whereas the 'Eurosceptics' have underlined the need for a broad security agenda by making references to 'globalised security', while seeking to reshape practices in defence of 'national security', the 'pro-EU' actors have opened up Turkey's definition of 'national security' for debate thereby sawing the seeds of an alternative security discourse. This is a significant departure from the earlier discourse of pro-EU actors who had refrained from using 'security speak' and sought to make the case for European Union membership on purely economic (welfare) and political (democracy) grounds. The point being that during the 1990s pro-EU actors in Turkey found the best way to bring about political change in Turkey as that of securitising economic issues and pointing to the economic costs of the existing conception of 'national security'. The paper falls into three parts. Part 1 looks at the 'traditional' discourse on security (the discourse of politicians and civilian-military bureaucrats) that has prevailed during the republican era. Part 2 seeks to identify the 1990s changes in Turkey's security discourses by focusing on the debates on the European Union membership. Part 3 suggests that a two-step strategy (first securitisation, then desecuritisation) might be the way out of the security dilemmas faced by developing countries like Turkey.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Research on the public sphere tends to characterize counterpublics as spaces for marginalized groups to freely express counterdiscourses, yet few studies examine precisely how and why individuals navigate between ‘enclaves’ and wider forums. This qualitative study aims to shed light on these processes by assessing the role of racial context in structuring discourse in predominately black and predominately white poetry venues. Since the mid 1980s, spoken word poetry has emerged as a popular form of cultural (and often political) expression, primarily due to the wide diffusion of ‘poetry slams’ and ‘open-mics’. Through in-depth interviews with poets and participant observation at performances, I show that racial context structured public discourse through the mechanism of double consciousness. Perceptions of white attitudes compelled some poets to engage in audience segregation by limiting certain discourses to predominately black (or racially mixed) settings while others consciously challenged white expectations through intentional subversion. Significantly, very few African-Americans expressed discomfort with critiquing whites and racism in predominately white settings. Blacks most often explained self censorship in wider forums as an effort to maintain positive group representations of African-Americans —not as the product of being unable to critique dominant discourses.