Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The category of “Recognition”, as intersubjective dimension of social interaction, seems to have application in the microsociological field only. Here it has both cognitive and pragmatic meaning. From the cognitive standpoint “recognition” refers to the ability to identify an object. At a pragmatic level it concerns individuals’ expectation to have their own values recognized by others.

In the public space the intersubjective dimension of recognition makes the idea of equality among people problematic, to the extent it claims respect for difference. Quoting Amartya Sen about the relationship between social justice and citizenship, today we are dealing with the questions “Equality of what?” and “Recognition of what?”
In the current debate about citizenship, we find an increasing effort to elaborate a normative and prescriptive ideal, able to satisfy claims both of redistribution and recognition.

In my opinion it is crucial to reintegrate the theory of recognition within the political-public sphere of European citizenship, as a civic space in which the dynamic of confrontation among different cultural perspectives takes place and new subjects claim the full recognition of their identity. Such a need stays at the origin of my attempt to test the integration process of Turkey in the European Union.

P. Ricoeur., Parcours de la Reconaissance, Editions Stock 2004.
A. Honneth., Kampf um Anerkennung. Grammatik sozialer Konflikte, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992.
A. Sen, Commodities and Capabilities, North Holland, New York 1985.
N. Fraser-A. Honneth., Umverteilung oder Anerkennung. Eine poltisch-philosophische Kontroverse, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003.
K. Eder., B. Giesen., European Citizenship between National Legacies and Postnational Projects, Oxford university press 2001.
See B. Kaleagasi., D. Akagul., S. Vaner., La Turquie en mouvement , Ed. Coplexe 1995.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Much has been debated about persuasion in public relations, especially with respect to the role of public relations in marketing communication. Professionally, public relations is often integrated with marketing to produce a unified front to consumers and stakeholders. However, this approach has been questioned in scholarly literature: To imbue public relations with marketing persuasion would damage the credibility of a role that is meant to be an advocate for public interests and a public liaison within the organization.
In order to understand the role of public relations within a marketing context, this study examines the communication objectives and processes of the global employee recognition firm, O.C. Tanner. Through an in-depth case study of the organization, this study reveals an under-examined role of public relations within marketing communication—to create the corporate brand—and demonstrates how public relations can be integrated with marketing communication without damaging the credibility of PR. This study fills a gap in public relations literature, where brand management has been under-developed, and enhances understanding for the practical use of the integrated communication model. From these findings, future research opportunities are identified to understand integrated communication, and public relation’s place in defining the organizational brand. Furthermore, this case reveals an under-analyzed type of marketing persuasion—that is, public relations as education—that builds relationships with stakeholders without compromising the integrity of public relations practice.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In Bound by Recognition (2003), Patchen Markell argues that the politics of recognition is founded on an “ideological view of identity.” According to Markell, the demand for recognition is motivated by the desire to “fix” what is believed to be a preexisting identity. Viewed in this way, the politics of recognition involves a necessarily problematic attempt to overcome the ontological limits of identity and action. Markell champions a politics of acknowledgement – a politics that recognizes identity as ever-evolving, contingent and provisional – as an alternative to the politics of recognition. In this essay, I contend that Markell misrepresents the politics of recognition and thus encourages us to forgo a politics of recognition prematurely. Drawing primarily from the work of Axel Honneth and Erving Goffman, I demonstrate that one can understand the demand for recognition in a way that renders it consistent with Markell’s understanding of identity as contingent and provisional. The demand for recognition is not necessarily a demand for a problematic fixity in identity – it can be a demand for a healthy stability in normative self-understandings. Ignoring vital distinctions between “fixity” and “stability” and “identity” and “self-understandings” leads Markell to mistake extreme forms of the demand for recognition as representative and thus to portray the politics of recognition and his preferred alternative as mutually exclusive. Armed with an alternative construction of the politics of recognition, I argue that the politics of acknowledgement is best understood not as a substitute for but rather as a complement to the politics of recognition.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: National and international legal developments prompted the British Labour government to draft the Gender Recognition Bill, a bill to make provision for and in connection to change of gender. The Bill passed both Houses in 2004 with an overwhelming majority. This paper examines the concepts of gender that emerged during the second reading of the Bill in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, respectively, and the concept of gender that underlies the Gender Recognition Act with regard to their implications for bi-genderedness as a normative gender regime.
Despite the fact that the Gender Recognition Act departs significantly from any previous laws in Europe that regulate gender transitions, it nevertheless reproduces a concept of normative bi-genderedness. While biology-based assumptions that were voiced in Parliament remain trapped in the logic of bi-genderedness, too, adherents of a gender logic that forgo inquiries into the causality of gender or gender dysphoria implicitly question the operations of a naturalised bi-gendered regime.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Traditional medicinal knowledge (TMK) has landed at the forefront of international discussions of global economic trade, access to healthcare, environmental sustainability and human rights. The recent attention garnered by traditional medicine in international legal discourse begs the question of why after so many years, the concept of TMK, long of interest primarily to anthropologists and ethnobotanists, has been pushed to the head of international legal and policy debates. The discourse of TMK in international law has been firmly embedded in a larger regime of neoliberalism and the hegemony of information capitalism meaning that currently to have TMK acknowledged means having it recognized vis-à-vis modernization, regulation and economic value. However, international legal frameworks are never securely bound and although they often work to contain areas of incompatibility, the increased recognition of TMK on an international level has meant the expansion of new spaces of articulation, negotiation, and resistance. As global legal and political institutions continue to grapple with ways to recognize and integrate TMK into their institutional neoliberal frameworks, indigenous peoples themselves are engaging in legal initiatives that exist outside the “conventional boundaries” of global legal institutions demanding recognition for the cultural value of TMK (which is not so easily incorporated into the existing legal frameworks). In doing so indigenous groups and other traditional communities are rearticulating the neoliberal legal forms of recognition to produce a multitude of alternative legal avenues that challenge the western hegemony of a single dominating legal order