Piety and Secularity Contested: Family and Youth Politics in post-Kemalist “New Turkey”

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This project examines family and youth politics in Turkey with particular attention to the reforms initiated in the last decade by the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). It interrogates the broader political vision to which this politics relates, and its resonances in Turkish society.Since the early days of the republic, family and youth politics have been a central arena of the Turkish modernization project, which initially entailed a strong secularist bias. Family and youth politics are a central focus as well of the AKP’s Islamization policy, which strives to create a ‘New Turkey’, based on a post-Kemalist ‘pious generation’. Against the backdrop of current political transformations in Turkey, and with a focus on the domains of youth and family, the project will (1) address the religio-political vision of the AKP and its translation in concrete policies, and (2) elicit their resonances in different milieus.The study will be guided by the following key questions: How are the AKP’s family and youth politics represented and negotiated in the Turkish public sphere and what role does religion play in this negotiation? How are AKP family and youth policies implemented from the national through local levels? What are the defining features of the political subject demanded by these politics? What, on the other hand, are the central questions and problem areas of Turkish family and youth politics from the perspectives of expert NGOs, and Turkish citizens from different backgrounds? What influences do AKP policies exert on the everyday life worlds of Turkish citizens? Through all these levels of analysis, the project interrogates the interplay of religious and secular semantics in negotiating the respective domains of family and youth politics.To investigate this battery of questions, the two subprojects on AKP family and youth politics use different methods within the framework of a superordinate Grounded Theory approach: (1) analysis of AKP discourses on family and youth politics and the reactions they elicit from the public; (2) focus group interviews with expert NGOs on family and youth policies, and related AKP reforms in this area in recent years; and (3) milieu-specific group discussions with residents of select cities/neighborhoods comprising a variety of social fabrics. Particular attention will be paid to how the two policy areas are interpreted in the context of concrete everyday life worlds. The project does thereby not consider religious and secular attitudes as antagonistic counterparts, but rather as ambivalent, situational, and intricately interrelated.