Armağan Öztürk Livres

The contemporary grounds for the critique of modern politics have also populated debates on today’s questions of democracy, political participation, the public sphere, pluralism, gender, ecology and freedom, to name but a few. It should not be forgotten that the problems of living together necessitate overcoming the misperception of politics as only an act between individuals, nations, institutions and political ideologies. Indeed, the problem of living together is a matter of living with others, with the state and its institutions, animals and nature, art and cultures. This political dimension is also manifest in every element of practical life, thus making it necessary to take into consideration gender, disability rights, nature and ecology, animals, social media, and cultural, computational and artistic freedom issues in the practice and politics of living together. Therefore, living together does not signify merely the inter-human sphere. Therefore, this book contains 13 chapters focusing on various dimensions of living together.

This anthology aims to conduct a wide-ranging discussion on the development of and changes to various elements of the public sphere in Turkish society. In this context, the term ‘public sphere’ refers to the different spheres of interaction in society, such as the media, urban spaces, political parties and social movements etc. The forms these areas of the public domain take are influenced by diverse economic, political and cultural organisations and bodies. Collectivity and subjectivity are produced (or reproduced) in these areas of the public sphere and then multiply and are transformed into intensive battlegrounds in modern capitalist society. On the other hand, discussions on the public sphere give rise to new critical perspectives on the liberal capitalist system and the concepts of democracy which derive from it. Bearing this state of affairs in mind, this book examines the development of the various political, social environmental and state elements of the public sphere in Turkey since the end of the 1980s. The contributions it contains adopt a variety of conceptual and analytical approaches to examining and analysing the notion of the public sphere and, by analysing the development of its different areas, endeavour to reveal the multifaceted changes that have taken place in Turkish society.