Critical Turkish Studies, Lecture Series, Dr. Aslı Vatansever: Turkey’s Academic Sweatshops

Turkey’s Academic Sweatshops and their Complicity with the State
(03.05.2017)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aslı Vatansever, Soziologin, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)

The recent developments in Turkey offer an exceptionally rich laboratory for the study of academic precarization. In addition to the global trend toward casualization and economic precarization of academic labor in neoliberal times, academics in Turkey are also faced with constant insecurity on political grounds, as the case of the Academics for Peace demonstrates. In Turkey, under an increasingly autocratic neoliberal regime, the inherent commercialization mechanisms of capitalist labor markets are also utilized for the purpose of political intimidation. The universities conspire with the state in the oppression of oppositional voices and put their decisive authority over the job security of academics to the service of the state. Here, we see a double pressure mechanism of economic and political precarization, which is buttressed and legitimized by the deeply-rooted anti-intellectualism within the Turkish society. Thus, oppositional academics in Turkey are subject to a triple pressure mechanism, consisting of economic and political precarization, and socio-cultural marginalization.

Видео Critical Turkish Studies, Lecture Series, Dr. Aslı Vatansever: Turkey’s Academic Sweatshops канала Institut für Turkistik Universität Duisburg-Essen