Associate Professor Anna J. Secor

Selected Recent Publications

Gokariksel, B. and Secor, A.J. 2010. Islamic-ness in the life of the commodity: veiling-fashion in Turkey Transactions of the Institute for British Geographers 35 (3): 313-333.

Link to the Journal

ABSTRACT: What makes a commodity ‘Islamic’? By focusing on the question of Islamic-ness as it traverses both material and symbolic production, this paper aims to contribute to recent research in geography on the lives of commodities. Our study demonstrates the instability of ‘Islamic-ness’ in the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey and draws out the implications of this finding for our understanding of the socio-spatial work of the commodity. The veiling-fashion (or tesettür) sector has become a conspicuous part of the Turkish apparel industry in the past thirty years. Firms producing veiling-fashion engage in the design, production, marketing and sale of distinctive commodities stylized to signify Islamic-ness. We begin by situating veiling-fashion within the broader contours of the Turkish apparel industry, economic restructuring, and the rise of an Islamic habitus in Turkey. Based on our 2008 survey of 174 veiling-fashion firms in Turkey and our case studies of three such firms, we seek to understand how and to what extent the commodity is inscribed as an Islamic commodity in the course of its life, from financing to marketing. We use survey data to explore the role of Islamic banking practices, Islamic trading practices, and Islamic workplace ethics in the itinerary of veiling-fashion. Drawing on our case studies of three veiling-fashion firms (Tekbir, Boutique Dayı, and Armine), we show how these companies represent their ambivalent relationships to Islamic-ness, both as a set of values and as a particular milieu in Turkey. Through this analysis, we find that the Islamic-ness of the commodity cannot in fact be located or fixed; it is instead best understood as a mode of insertion into socio-spatial networks. Veiling-fashion as a commodity thus enters into and becomes constitutive of the wider material and symbolic networks that enact Islamic-ness in Turkey today.

Secor, A.J. 2010. Social Surveys, interviews and focus groups, in Research Methods in Geography: A First Course. Edited by: John Paul Jones III and Basil Gomez. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 194-205.


Link to the Book



Gokariksel, B. and Secor, A.J.  2009. New transnational geographies of Islamism, capitalism, and subjectivity: the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey.  Area 41, 1: 6-18. Reprinted in: Pink, Johanna, ed. 2009 Muslim Societies in the Age of Mass Consumption. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Link to the Book
Link to the Journal

ABSTRACT: The rise of the transnational veiling-fashion industry in Turkey has taken place within the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, the subjection of the veil to new regulations, and the resurgence of Islamic identities worldwide. Even after almost two decades since its first catwalk appearance, the idea of “veiling-fashion” continues to be controversial, drawing criticism from secular and devout Muslim segments of society alike. Analyzing veiling-fashion as it plays out across economic, political and cultural fields is to enter into a new understanding of the role of Islam in the global arena today. Veiling-fashion crystallizes a series of issues about Islamic identity, the transnational linkages of both producers and consumers, and the shifting boundaries between Islamic ethics and the imperatives of neoliberal capitalism. In this paper, our overarching argument is that controversies and practices surrounding veiling-fashion show how Islamic actors are adapting and transforming neoliberal capitalism at the same time as they navigate a complex geopolitical terrain in which Islam – and the iconic Muslim, headscarf-wearing woman – has been cast as a threatening “Other.” Thus the rise of veiling-fashion as a transnational phenomenon positions women and women’s bodies at the center of political debates and struggles surrounding what it means to be “modern” and Muslim today. Based on interviews with producers, consumers and salesclerks, and our analysis of newspaper articles, catalogs and web sites, this article traces out how the transnational production, sale, and consumption of veiling-fashion works to order spaces of geopolitics, geo-economics and subject formation.

***Secor A J. 2008. Žižek’s dialectics of difference and the problem of space.  Environment and Planning A 40(11) 2623 – 2630.

Link to the Journal

ABSTRACT: This paper begins with the question of what about dialectics might be interesting to geographers today. I argue that, for those who are interested in engaging dialectical thought, Slavoj Žižek’s work offers a productive way of conceptualizing an open dialectic without synthesis or totality. The goal of this paper is to explain Žižek’s idea of the parallax view and to demonstrate its relevance for geographers. To do this, I begin by showing how Žižek’s dialectical vision differs from that of David Harvey by using the example of Harvey’s analysis of ‘capitalist imperialism’. Next, I turn to Deleuzian spatial ontology and its understandings of virtual and actual spaces. I discuss Žižek’s engagement with Gilles Deleuze’s thought and draw out the implications of a dialectical understanding of the virtual and the actual.

***Secor, A.J. 2007. Between longing and despair: State, space and subjectivity in Turkey. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25(1): 33-52.

Link to the Journal

ABSTRACT: This paper begins as an investigation of the spatiality of the state in Turkey. In everyday life the state is experienced and recognized through a multiplicity of sites, agents, institutions, techniques, and regulatory capacities. Given this fragmentation, I ask how it is that the state is conceptualized as having a reality beyond its incoherence. Through a discursive analysis of focus-group discussions with lower-class and lower-middle-class men and women in Istanbul, I trace the spatial – temporal techniques through which state power is enacted. I argue that this power operates through referral and deferral, circulation and arrest; it is the power both to set in motion and to suspend the circulation of people, documents, money, and influence that marks out the space – time of the state. Further, my reading of focus-group texts suggests that it is through the operation of the space – time of the state that individuals both submit to state power and become subjects of rights—that is, citizens. At once establishing the authority of the state and the self-recognition of the subject, the Althusserian turn towards the law is a gesture of conscience or guilt. However, I argue that not all subjects are equally guilty in their imagined relationship to the state, some are more guilty than others, and, in this inequality, difference enters into the process of subjection. Focus-group participants discuss how acts such as showing identity cards or performing labor function both to assert their innocence and to mark them as guilty. By tracing out how spatial techniques of power and processes of subjection are discussed among particular groups of people in Istanbul, I hope to speak in an alternative voice to the usual top-down narration of the Turkish ‘strong state’. Finally, this paper is an attempt to wrap an argument around the secret of the state, around the desire, despair, and guilt that infuse the relational production of citizen and state.

Secor, A.J. 2006. “An unrecognizable condition has arrived”: Law, violence, and the state of exception. In Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (Eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence. Routledge, New York, pp. 37-53.

Link to the Book



Secor, A.J. and O’Loughlin, J.V. 2005    Social and political trust in Istanbul and Moscow: A comparative analysis of individual and neighbourhood effects. Transactions of the Institute of British Geography, 30 (1): 50-66.


Link to the Journal


ABSTRACT: Aiming to bring local context into studies of social capital, our study uses samples of 4006 individuals in Istanbul and 3476 in Moscow using a comparable questionnaire. The stratification of each city's neighbourhoods on the basis of socio-economic characteristics provided the basis for the sampling. Using a multilevel modelling procedure, we show both that locality matters (neighbourhood effect proved significant) and that social capital may indeed be constituted in very particular ways in illiberal democracies such as Russia and Turkey. Social and political trust are frequently thought to contribute to social capital – that is, to provide social resources upon which individuals or groups may draw for their political efficacy. Trust in fellow citizens in Istanbul exhibits a positive relationship to associational activities (joining clubs etc.), while in Moscow social trust can be explained predominantly in terms of (lower) socio-economic status. At the same time, important similarities emerged between the two cases. For social trust, in both cities the `cosmopolitanization thesis', which holds that those who associate more widely are also more trusting of fellow citizens, generally applied. Further, in both cities, residents with lower socio-economic status (though in Moscow this is complicated by education) and lower likelihoods of engagement in direct political action were more trustful of parliament. While this is the opposite of what we have been led to expect based on Western democratic politics, it is a reasonable outcome of illiberal democratic governance operating in these two cities.

Secor, A.J. 2005. Islamism, democracy and the political production of the headscarf issue in Turkey. In Ghazi-Walid Falah and Caroline Nagel(Eds.), Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion and Space, pp. 203-225.  New York, Guilford Press.

Link to the Book



Secor, Anna J, and John O'Loughlin. 2005. "Social and Political Trust in Istanbul and Moscow: A Comparative Analysis of Individual and Neighbourhood Effects" Transactions, Institute of British Geographers. New Series, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 66-82(17)

Link to full text article (PDF format)

ABSTRACT: Aiming to bring local context into studies of social capital, our study uses samples of 4006 individuals in Istanbul and 3476 in Moscow using a comparable questionnaire. The stratification of each city’s neighbourhoods on the basis of socio-economic characteristics provided the basis for the sampling. Using a multilevel modelling procedure, we show both that locality matters (neighbourhood effect proved significant) and that social capital may indeed be constituted in very particular ways in illiberal democracies such as Russia and Turkey. Social and political trust are frequently thought to contribute to social capital – that is, to provide social resources upon which individuals or groups may draw for their political efficacy. Trust in fellow citizens in Istanbul exhibits a positive relationship to associational activities (joining clubs etc.), while in Moscow social trust can be explained predominantly in terms of (lower) socio-economic status. At the same time, important similarities emerged between the two cases. For social trust, in both cities the 'cosmopolitanization thesis', which holds that those who associate more widely are also more trusting of fellow citizens, generally applied. Further, in both cities, residents with lower socio-economic status (though in Moscow this is complicated by education) and lower likelihoods of engagement in direct political action were more trustful of parliament. While this is the opposite of what we have been led to expect based on Western democratic politics, it is a reasonable outcome of illiberal democratic governance operating in these two cities.

KEYWORDS: Moscow; Istanbul; neighbourhood contextual effects; political trust; generalized social trust

"'There Is an Istanbul That Belongs to Me': Citizenship, Space, and Identity in the City" Annals of the Association of American Geographers. June 2004, vol. 94, no. 2, pp. 352-368(17)

(email me at ajseco2@uky.edu for a copy of the full article)

ABSTRACT: The citizenship ideal of the Turkish republic has taken shape through the logics of alterity, defined by and through both a paradoxical understanding of Turkishness and the rise of Kurdish identity politics. Citizenship in Turkey represents an uneasy marriage between ethnic and civic conceptions of national identity and belonging. This article develops an analysis of citizenship and everyday spatial practice in Istanbul through the narratives produced in focus group discussions with Kurdish-identified, migrant women. Their stories explore how citizenship, as a hegemonic process that assembles identities, fixes power relations, and disciplines space, is encountered and contested through the spatial practices of everyday life, through what Michel de Certeau calls the tactics of "making do." Viewing dominant discourses and practices of citizenship as techniques of spatial organization ("strategies," in de Certeau's terms), this study focuses on how participants narrate their own spatial stories of resistance to and appropriation of dominant codings of "the citizen" and "the stranger" in the Turkish context. This analysis brings to the fore the ways in which focus group participants encounter discourses and practices that position them as strangers and citizens, their use of tactics of anonymity and strategies of identity as they traverse city spaces, and the moments in which they situate themselves as political subjects in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces in Istanbul, through the spatial enactment of the strategies of citizenship and the tactics of everyday life.

KEYWORDS: citizenship; urban geography; Kurdish identity; Turkey; Michel de Certeau

"Belaboring gender: the spatial practice of work and the politics of 'making do' in Istanbul" Environment and Planning A. December 2003, vol. 35, no. 12, pp. 2209-2227.

Link to full text article (requires electronic subscription to Environmental and Planning A)

ABSTRACT: From focus-group and survey research conducted in Istanbul between 1998 and 2002, I argue that the spatial practice of work is critical to the constitution of what it means to 'be a woman' in the Turkish context. My approach to gender and work makes use of Butler's theory of performativity in order to show how discourses and practices of work are not only implicated in the production of male and female gender identities but also provide a variety of routes through which different aspects of masculinity and femininity are performed. In my reading of the discussions and debates assembled by the focus-group texts, I try to show how work compels various performances, such as the 'good woman' or the 'bad girl' in Istanbul. Further, work not only calls forth different ways of being a woman in relation to the city but also produces differentiated female bodies. Finally, I argue that work is a spatial practice through which belonging, identity, and rights are staked in the urban environment.

"Neoliberal globalization," with Susan Roberts and Matthew Sparke. Antipode. Novermber 2003, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 886-897.

Link to full text article (requires subscription to Synergy)

"The Veil and Urban Space in Istanbul: women's dress, mobility and Islamic knowledge" Gender, Place and Culture. March 2002, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 5-22.

Link to full text article (requires subscription to Ingenta Select)

ABSTRACT: The issue of veiling marks an ideological fault line in urban Turkey. Based on focus groups conducted with migrant women to Istanbul in the spring of 1999, this article aims to show how veiling, as a form of dress, is a spatial practice that gains its significance through women's urban mobility and their construction of Islamic understandings in the city. At the same time, both urban mobility and Islamic knowledge are structured by wider relations of power, such as the struggle between the secular state and resurgent Islamic politics. In order to situate the practice of veiling within these structures, the author argues that Istanbul is marked by a pattern of shifting 'regimes of veiling,' and that these spatialized norms of dress affect the meaning and enactment of women's veiling choices. This concept is particularly useful to draw out the ways in which veiling, despite providing some protection from urban harassment, may actually constrain women's urban mobility in the context of Istanbul. The focus group analysis illustrates these points and demonstrates how women's views on Islam provide a basis for their attitudes towards veiling, mobility and space. The author suggests that among the participants, two main trends in Islamic understandings related to veiling can be observed: one towards the 'privatization' of religion along secularist lines, accompanied by a flexible attitude towards veiling, and another towards the public contestation of formal anti-veiling regimes justified in terms of knowledge gleaned through direct, textual engagement with Islam. In this way, this study aims to link veiling, as a socio-spatial practice, to the local, gendered production of Islamic knowledge in Istanbul.

"Islamist politics: Antisystemic or postmodern movements?" Geopolitics. Winter 2001, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 117- 134.

Link to full text article (requires subscription to EBSCOhost "Academic Search Premier")

SHORT ABSTRACT: Presents a study which discussed an approach to the geopolitics of Islamism. Challenges of Islamism to secularist categories; Politics of representing Islamist politics; Discussion of Islamism as an anti-systemic movement.

"Toward a feminist counter- geopolitics: Gender, space and Islamist politics in Istanbul" Space and Polity. December 2001. vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 199- 219.

Link to full text article (requires subscription to Ingenta Select)

ABSTRACT: Geopolitical reasoning privileges the global scale as the locus of spatialised power relations. For the past 20 years, Islam and Islamist politics have figured prominently in geopolitical discourses of international conflict. This paper puts forth a feminist counter-geopolitics that focuses on how Islamist political practices and discourses are written into everyday life and urban spaces. Approaching political activity as comprising both formal voting behaviour and informal associational activities, this study uses survey and focus group data (collected in Istanbul in 1998/99) to explore gender and Islamist politics at national and local scales. Exploring women's activities within both formal and informal urban political spaces, the study reveals some of the ways in which women participate in the daily production and contestation of Islamist politics in Istanbul.

"Ideologies in Crisis: Political Cleavages and Electoral Politics in Turkey in the 1990s." Political Geography. June 2001, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 539- 560.

(email me at ajseco2@uky.edu for a copy of the full article)

ABSTRACT: A case study of the Turkish political arena provides a window into processes of democratic consolidation at the margins of Europe. This study focuses on socio-political cleavages and aims to map the space of political competition in Turkey. This discussion is based on an analysis of the discourses that defined the 1995 national election campaign, in which the Islamist Party, the Welfare Party (RP), won a plurality of the votes nation-wide. Turkish media are used to identify four issue continua that defined the arena of competition in the campaign, and five political parties are placed at points along these continua. This study finds that, because Turkish political parties do not link economic and political issues in "typical" right and left packages, a three-dimensional cleavage model that includes economic, political and "identity"-based dimensions best represents the coordinates of political competition in Turkey. In addition to creating a cleavage model for Turkish politics, this research explores the possibilities and limitations of applying social-cleavage models beyond the borders of Western Europe and the advanced industrial societies.

KEYWORDS: Turkey; Political parties; Elections; Cleavages; Islamism

"Gender, Orientalism and Class in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters: To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters &c." Ecumene [now Cultural Geographies]. October 1999, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 375- 398.

Link to full text article (requires subscription to EBSCOhost "Academic Search Premier")

ABSTRACT: Aims to contribute to the body of work on women's travel narratives and to distinguish the `Turkish Embassy Letters' as a text produced in the material context of eighteenth-century gender relations. Argument on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travel narrative; Representation of oriental woman; Role of class-based discources in the construction of difference and literature.