Özge Yaka

Özge Yaka was post-doctoral at the Collège in 2015 and 2016 in the Nancy Fraser's chair Rethinking Social Justice.Özge Yaka has received her PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University in 2011. She has held positions as an Assistant Professor at Ondokuz Mayis University in Turkey, as Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow and as a Visiting Professor at John F. Kennedy Institute, Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include critical social theory, social movement studies, global and environmental justice, protest and subjectivity and political ecologies of water commons. 

Research project 

Arrival: 01/09/2015
Scientific Project - Watershed: The Struggles around Water Usage Rights and the Challenge for Global Justice

Her project on the community resistance against private small-scale hydroelectric power plants (HES) in Turkey in the last decade, aims to combine the normative dimension of global justice with a structural and action-theoretical perspective. She is particularly interested in whether and how different actors and communities engaged in the Anti-HES movement – and ultimately in the entire movement for environmental justice – are constructing representations of causality, which potentially connect them to the global processes, thereby transcending their local environment and national political space. The research aims to show particularly with which mechanisms movements and marginalized communities pose questions of “being affected” by global actors. The web of causal relations that constitutes the emerging transnational rationality of justice, she contends, is shaped differently when it addresses the grammar of the nation state as when it engages with a transformative form of politics trying to challenge, contest and revise “the very grammar of frame-setting”. By analysing the specific modes and mechanisms of framing struggles she aims to understand how connecting the local to a transnational public sphere imports a strategy of “boundary expansion”, and to what extent global structures of economic governance challenge and thus shape community struggles.

Publications

Her recent article (with Serhat Karakayali), “The Spirit of Gezi: The Recomposition of Political Subjectivities in Turkey” has appeared in New Formations (83/2014) and she has been publishing her work in various journals and edited volumes in English and Turkish.