Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for August 2021, Defne Över (Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University, USA). Her article for Current Sociology, From self-censorship to contention: Shame triggered participation in the 2013 Gezi Protests is Free Access this month.

Defne Över

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

D. Över: My work centers on a set of important questions raised by the return of repressive regimes in the 21st century and the related processes of democratic backsliding and mass mobilization. I explore the strategies instrumentalized in centralization of power, the uncertainties experienced by ordinary people in the face of autocratization, and how societal response to uncertainty transforms political institutions. My interest in these topics is inseparable from my own experiences as a citizen of Turkey. In the last 20 years, Turkey has seen autocratization in all venues of life, an increasing emphasis on religion in the construct of nationalism, and mass mobilization against the government. Going through these processes resulted in a human-centered take on authoritarianism in my research, and a focus on how ordinary people interpret repressive politics; how they experience centralization of power; and how their actions shape political institutions in return.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “From self-censorship to contention: Shame triggered participation in the 2013 Gezi Protests”?

D. Över: Back in 2012, when I was a doctoral student in search of a dissertation topic, Turkey had become the country with the highest number of journalists in jail in the world. Each day, Turkish citizens would wake up to news of journalists being arrested on terror charges, journalists being fired from their news outlets, and news being censored. In response to these developments, journalists would get together in front of prisons in solidarity with their colleagues, organize protests in public squares and establish new outlets. As a citizen of Turkey, these developments affected me personally. They reshaped my access to the news while making me feel anxious about the future of my country. As a sociologist, I was also curious about the source of these changes in the media landscape. So, I developed my interest into a sociological inquiry and started my fieldwork in Turkey. Shortly after, the biggest mass protest event of modern Turkish history, Gezi Protests, erupted, and it became clear that Turkey was one of the many countries going through a repressive and contentious moment in the 21st century. The data that I collected in those days became the basis for my article “From self-censorship to contention: Shame triggered participation in the 2013 Gezi Protests” as well as my book project on the transformation of the Turkish media.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

D. Över: The article depicts self-censorship in the media as a conformist form of behavior. Self-censorship is specifically highlighted as a form of “necessary conformism” where journalists act in conformity with state pressure without really believing in it. The article ties this form of action to the emotion of shame, showing how shame maintains further practice of self-censorship at the same time as inhering a latent desire to stop it. I argue that this latent desire triggers protest behavior when a contingent event such as the Gezi Protests generates hope for change. This argument points at the role of shame in inciting contentious action. It comes as a challenge to the scholarship that associates shame only with passivity in action. The article also adds to the scholarship that explores the role of emotions in the mobilization at Gezi. The focus in previous studies remained on emotions experienced during the demonstrations. With this article, the focus moves to emotions endured in the work setting prior to Gezi protests.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

D. Över: It has been seven years since the eruption of Gezi protests. While the protests constituted an opportunity for liberation from necessary conformism and shame at the time, they neither led to an overall improvement of political conditions in the country nor to an increase in the possibilities for free journalism. In fact, since 2013, authoritarianism has further entrenched in Turkey and Freedom House changed Turkey’s media freedom classification from partly free to not free. Since then, a wave of authoritarianism also hit the globe. Today, we see increased pressures over the media in a geography spanning from Eastern Europe to India. In Hungary, for instance, the ruling party, Fidesz, took over and forcibly closed media outlets to achieve greater media control. Similarly, in Poland, the ruling Law and Justice Party imposed complete control over state television, cracked down on independent media and vowed to press ahead with plans to limit media ownership by foreign companies. In all these other places where authoritarianism entrenches, critics warn against increasing practice of self-censorship. The theoretical framework offered in this study reminds us that self-censorship as a (necessary) conformist form of professional practice carries the potential for contention in the shame it generates. What looks like submission in the current moment should therefore not drive us to despair. It takes a contingent event to generate hope for social change and turn conformism into participation in a mass protest event.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

D. Över: I have two other articles that are closely related to my work on self-censorship and contention in the media. One explores how the democratic backsliding process in Turkey converged in the news narratives in the media: https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720975879, and the other provides an explanation for how previously fragmented causes of contention come to be expressed in conjoint action in mass protests: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X20170000041017.