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Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/6
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Publication Open Access The variable selection problem in the Three Worlds of Welfare literature(Springer, 2019) Öker, İbrahim; Yıldırım, Kerem; Yakut-Çakar, Burcu; Department of Sociology; Yörük, Erdem; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 28982Based on a quantitative meta-analysis of empirical studies, this article points out a significant flaw in the Three Worlds of Welfare literature, the variable selection problem. Compiling, classifying, and quantitatively analysing all variables that have been employed in this literature, the article shows first that variable selection has depended more on case selection than on theory. Scholars tend to employ variables based on data availability, rather than selecting variables according to theoretical frameworks. Second, the use of welfare policy variables is mostly limited to the analysis of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, while studies analysing non-OECD countries, where data is limited, tend to use developmental outcome variables as a proxy. This tendency harms conceptualization and operationalization of welfare regimes, as well as blur the boundary between development and welfare regimes studies. Third, the use of original Esping-Andersen variables remains very limited, undermining continuity, comparability, and reliability within the literature.Publication Open Access Discovering Black Lives Matter events in the United States: Shared Task 3, CASE 2021(Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021) Giorgi, Salvatore; Zavarella, Vanni; Tanev, Hristo; Stefanovitch, Nicolas; Hwang, Sy; Hettiarachchi, Hansi; Ranasinghe, Tharindu; Kalyan, Vivek; Tan, Paul; Tan, Shaun; Andrews, Martin; Hu, Tiancheng; Stoehr, Niklas; Re, Francesco Ignazio; Vegh, Daniel; Atzenhofer, Dennis; Curtis, Brenda; Department of Sociology; Hürriyetoğlu, Ali; Teaching Faculty; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and HumanitiesEvaluating the state-of-the-art event detection systems on determining spatio-temporal distribution of the events on the ground is performed unfrequently. But, the ability to both (1) extract events ""in the wild"" from text and (2) properly evaluate event detection systems has potential to support a wide variety of tasks such as monitoring the activity of socio-political movements, examining media coverage and public support of these movements, and informing policy decisions. Therefore, we study performance of the best event detection systems on detecting Black Lives Matter (BLM) events from tweets and news articles. The murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of police officers received global attention throughout the second half of 2020. Protests against police violence emerged worldwide and the BLM movement, which was once mostly regulated to the United States, was now seeing activity globally. This shared task asks participants to identify BLM related events from large unstructured data sources, using systems pretrained to extract socio-political events from text. We evaluate several metrics, assessing each system's ability to evolution of protest events both temporally and spatially. Results show that identifying daily protest counts is an easier task than classifying spatial and temporal protest trends simultaneously, with maximum performance of 0.745 (Spearman) and 0.210 (Pearson r), respectively. Additionally, all baselines and participant systems suffered from low recall (max.5.08), confirming the high impact of media sourcing in the modelling of protest movements.Publication Open Access The promising momentum and collective practices of the recently expanding network of consumer-led ecological food initiatives in Turkey(İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2020) Department of Sociology; Al, İrem Soysal; Department of Sociology; Graduate School of Social Sciences and HumanitiesThe main objective of this paper is to contribute to the discussions on the collective ecological food initiatives in Turkey that the academic literature has to a large extent ignored. This study provides a current and detailed analysis of these initiatives in Turkey, whose momentum has expanded considerably in recent years, especially in Istanbul. The study investigates food communities and consumer food cooperatives as two significant forms of consumer-led collective ecological food initiatives, comparing these in terms of their motivations, organization models, and functions. A comprehensive picture of almost 20 consumer-led ecological food initiatives is presented, and 11 prominent examples of these possessing transformative ambitions in Istanbul are discussed in detail. The fieldwork is based on my participant observation of the Kadikoy Cooperative, of which I have been a member for one year, and close interactions with the members of other ecological food initiatives for two years, as well as 20 in-depth interviews with the members of these initiatives. This paper examines the commonalities in these initiatives that differentiate them from other alternative food channels, as well as the connections, relationships, and collaborations among these recently emerging collective ecological initiatives. The paper discusses concrete examples of the alternative relations in food production, distribution, and consumption that these urban ecological food initiatives try to offer in practice and that indicate the potential power these initiatives have for transforming current food relations and for contributing to the emerging food sovereignty struggle in Turkey. The study also illustrates how the consumers and producers in this network of initiatives have conceptualized their practices and ambitions within the food sovereignty movement.Publication Open Access The politics of Syrian refugees in Turkey: a question of inclusion and exclusion through citizenship(Cogitatio Press, 2018) Department of Sociology; Akçapar, Şebnem Köşer; Şimşek, Doğuş; Teaching Faculty; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and HumanitiesTurkey began to receive refugees from Syria in 2011 and has since become the country hosting the highest number of refugees, with more than 3.5 million Syrians and half a million people of other nationalities, mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. An important turning point regarding the legal status of Syrian refugees has come with recent amendments to the Turkish citizenship law. Based on ongoing academic debates on integration and citizenship, this article will explore these two concepts in the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey. We will argue that the shift in the Turkish citizenship law is a direct outcome of recent migration flows. We further argue that the citizenship option is used both as a reward for skilled migrants with economic and cultural capital and as a tool to integrate the rest of the Syrians. It also reflects other social, political and demographic concerns of the Turkish government. Using our recent ethnographic study with Syrians and local populations in two main refugee hosting cities in Turkey, Istanbul and Gaziantep, we will locate the successes and weaknesses of this strategy by exemplifying the views of Syrian refugees on gaining Turkish citizenship and the reactions of Turkish nationals.Publication Open Access Gender policy architecture in Turkey: localizing transnational discourses of women's employment(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2017) Alnıaçık, Ayşe; Deniz, Ceren; Department of International Relations; Department of Sociology; Olcay, Özlem Altan; Gökşen, Fatoş; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; Department of Sociology; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A; 51292This article studies the institutionalization and implementation of policies addressing women’s low labor force participation in Turkey. It examines how state actors and institutions translate gender mainstreaming and work-family balance in the Turkish policy context. Approaching the state as a multi-layered and hierarchical set of institutions and practices, we trace the emergence of a policy architecture that marginalizes questions of women’s employment and gender equality. Our goal is to shed light on how state actors and institutions actively participate in vernacularizing transnational gender policy norms and, in the process, bend these norms so far that they produce contradictory meanings and practices.Publication Open Access Contentious welfare: the Kurdish conflict and social policy as counterinsurgency in Turkey(Wiley, 2020) Department of Sociology; Yörük, Erdem; Yoltar, Çağrı; Faculty Member; Researcher; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 28982; N/AThe period since the 1990s has witnessed the expanding political influence of the Kurdish movement across the country as well as a transformation in the welfare system, manifesting itself mainly in the emergence of extensive social assistance programs. While Turkish social assistance policy has been formally neutral regarding who is entitled to state aid, Kurds have been de facto singled out by these new welfare programs, as is shown by existing quantitative work. Based on a discourse analysis of legislation, parliamentary proceedings, and news media, this article examines the ways in which Turkish governments and policymakers consider the Kurdish question in designing welfare policies. We illustrate that Kurdish mobilization has become a central theme that informed the transformation of Turkish welfare system over the past three decades.Publication Open Access Between the state and the world market: small-scale hazelnut production in the Black Sea region(İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2020) Erköse, H. Yener; Şahin, Osman; Yükseker, Deniz; Department of Sociology; Sert, Hüseyin Deniz; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; Graduate School of Social Sciences and HumanitiesTurkey is the world's largest hazelnut producer and exporter, yet hazelnut farmers have been growing hazelnuts in increasingly difficult conditions even for the years when production levels and hazelnut prices are high. In this paper, we take up the contradictions in hazelnut cultivation in Turkey and seek to show that, despite the commonsense opinion that the problem stems from small-scale cultivation, the more important problem is the unequal power relations that exist in the hazelnut market. We make the following arguments in the paper based on some of the findings from the field study we carried out in the Western and Eastern Black Sea regions in 2017. Issues exist regarding productivity and profitability in hazelnut cultivation characterized by small holdings. Hazelnut farmers are often unable to meet the expenditures and investments required for raising productivity. These problems arise more from the farmers' demographic profiles and debt levels and the unequal power relations in the hazelnut market with respect to small-scale production. Therefore, resolving the problems in hazelnut cultivation might require making changes that favor small farmers' power relations in the hazelnut market rather than enlarging holdings. / Türkiye dünyanın en büyük fındık üreticisi ve ihracatçısı konumunda. Ancak fındık üreticileri, bazı yıllar bol mahsul veya mahsullerine iyi fiyat alsalar bile, giderek daha zorlu koşullarda üretim yapıyorlar. Bu yazıda, Türkiye’de fındık üretiminin barındırdığı çelişkileri ele alacağız. Sorunların kaynağında fındık işletmelerinin küçük olmasının yattığı yönündeki genel kabulün aksine, sorunun aslen fındık piyasasındaki eşitsiz güç ilişkilerinden kaynaklandığını göstermeye çalışacağız. 2017’de Doğu ve Batı Karadeniz Bölgeleri’nde yaptığımız alan araştırmasının verilerinin bir bölümünün bulgularına dayanan makalede şu savları ortaya koyuyoruz. Türkiye’de küçük işletmelerde yapılan fındık tarımının verimlilik ve kârlılık konusunda sorunları vardır. Fındık üreticilerinin çoğu verim artırımı için gerekli harcamaları ve yatırımı yapamamaktadırlar. Bu sorunlar, üretim birimlerinin küçük olmasından çok, fındık üreticilerinin demografik profili, borçlanma ve fındık piyasasındaki eşitsiz yapıdan kaynaklanmaktadır. Dolayısıyla, fındık üretimindeki sorunların çözülmesi için üretim ölçeğini büyütmekten çok, eşitsiz güç ilişkilerinin hâkim olduğu küresel piyasada üretici lehine değişiklikler yapmak daha uygun olabilir.Publication Open Access Neo-Ottomanism and Cool Japan in comparative perspective(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2021) Shinohara, Chika; Department of Sociology; Ergin, Murat; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 106427Turkey and Japan have comparable histories of modernization beginning in the nineteenth century. They have since then produced modernities that are considered a mix of ""Eastern""and ""Western.""Over recent decades, both faced the question of what comes after modernity and began manufacturing their versions of authenticities and cultural exports. This paper comparatively locates two symptoms of this process. ""Neo-Ottomanism""refers to the increasing cultural consumption of Turkey's imperial past while ""Cool Japan""emphasizes popular products in entertainment, fashion, youth culture, and food, intending to shift Japan's image to a ""cool""place. Both projects, in different ways, are sponsored by the state; yet their reception in popular culture illustrates the vexed relationship between the state and culture: while states endeavor to colonize culture for their own interests, popular culture provides avenues to outwit the state's attempts. Popular culture's autonomy in both contexts has to do with the collapse of traditional hierarchies, which has paved the ways for the promotion and export of new identity claims. Local and global representations of neo-Ottomanism and Cool Japan differ. Internally, they are fragmented; externally, they are linked to international ""soft power,""and offer alternatives modernities in Turkey and Japan's regional areas of influence.Publication Open Access PROTEST-ER: retraining BERT for protest event extraction(Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021) Caselli, Tommaso; Basile, Angelo; Department of Sociology; Department of Computer Engineering; Hürriyetoğlu, Ali; Mutlu, Osman; Teaching Faculty; Researcher; Department of Sociology; Department of Computer Engineering; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of EngineeringWe analyze the effect of further pre-training BERT with different domain specific data as an unsupervised domain adaptation strategy for event extraction. Portability of event extraction models is particularly challenging, with large performance drops affecting data on the same text genres (e.g., news). We present PROTEST-ER, a retrained BERT model for protest event extraction. PROTEST-ER outperforms a corresponding generic BERT on out-of-domain data of 8.1 points. Our best performing models reach 51.91-46.39 F1 across both domains.Publication Open Access The gendered workplaces of women garment workers in Istanbul(Taylor _ Francis, 2017) Department of Sociology; Can, Başak Bulut; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 219278Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with women garment workers in a low-income neighbourhood of Istanbul, and observations in the ateliers where they worked, this article examines their work experiences in the gendered and sexualised work atmosphere of garment workshops. There are three interrelated levels upon which the gender-related issues emerge in women garment workers’ stories. The first set of discourses portrays young female garment workers in highly sexualised terms, and the second concerns the use of kinship vocabulary and avoidance of impersonal work relationships. That is, women workers’ experiences in capitalist production sites were trivialised and regulated through the sexualisation of their bodies and the deployment of kinship idioms while addressing their role at the workplace. The third level analyses women’s submissive, subversive or contradictory responses to these gendered disciplinary techniques and representations, i.e. the construction of their subjectivities. These three levels point to two things: first, cultural presumptions about marriage, women’s sexuality and reproductive cycles are materialised at the workplace. Second, gendered instantiations of these presumptions in a specific work environment are both informed by their familial roles (such as daughter, wife, mother, widowed) and inform their future reproductive preferences (whether they marry, have a child, get a divorce, etc.). This article shows how the ways in which women’s difference is construed and acted upon in the garment industry are inseparable from women’s reproductive decisions.