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Assistant Professor Anna J. Secor
Selected Recent
Publications
 "'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.
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