Researcher:
Al, İrem Soysal

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PhD Student

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İrem Soysal

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Al

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Al, İrem Soysal

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2017 - 20202

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    Quotidian realities of organic mothering in Turkey
    (Cambridge Univ Press, 2017) N/A; Al, İrem Soysal; PhD Student; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; 354418
    This article explores how mothers in Turkey respond to the current atmosphere of food fear and the neoliberal rhetoric of the individualization of risks, as well as interrogating the class dimension of the varying ways in which mothers experience pressures regarding feeding their children in an organic manner. The article primarily suggests that mothers adopt different organic food strategies across class divisionsparticularly through class-specific definitions of organicso as to deal in stratified ways with the challenges organic feeding brings. It indicates that organic mothering practices have been incorporated into the lifestyle and cultural distinctions of middle-class families and reinforced by rural nostalgia. Contrary to this, ideas about the organic and rural nostalgia are mostly translated as home-made for lower-class families. Relying on sixteen in-depth interviews with mothers in stanbul and on an analysis of posts and comments found on a mothering blog, this article offers empirical findings on analyses of organic mothering and risk from a standpoint and location that have been largely ignored in the existing literature. It also contributes to analyses about neoliberal transformations in the Turkish food market and the growing literature on family and neoliberalism under the government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi, AKP) by bringing a research-based view on the subjective experiences of mothers into a discourse that is rather political in nature as well as into policy research discussions.
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    PublicationOpen 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 Humanities
    The 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.