Feminist Politics in Contemporary Turkey: Neoliberal Attacks,Feminist Claims to the Public

This article aims to offer a critical reading of the feminist claims to the public sphere in Turkey in the 2000s when there was transformation in the way public and private spheres are defined. We try to link the feminist claims to the public with the shifts in the patriarchal regime of the country in the decade. The main argument of the article is that feminist politics of the 2000s had the potential for an alternative imagination of the public and that they also faced the risk of assimilation into the de-/re-publicization process of the same period. The article starts with a brief outline of the post-1980 period, which hosted both the emergence of independent feminist organizing and the neoliberal restructuration of Turkey’s politics. It continues with the analysis of the Justice and Development Party’s terms in government, as the consolidation of neoliberal restructuration process. We conclude with the (possible) feminist interventions to the new mode of patriarchy that emerges out of this process.     

School Meals and Food Poverty: Children’s Views,Parents’ Perspectives and the Role of School

This paper addresses the importance of school meals in balancing food budgets and diets among 45 low‐income families in Portugal. Drawing on interviews with both parents and children (aged 11–15 years) we found that children’s views on the quality of school meals affect their willingness to eat at school and heighten parental concerns with health, food and resources. For parents, school meals are crucial to ensure children’s dietary variety and balancing tight food budgets. Schools’ role in food poverty alleviation is also critically addressed, contributing to current and future sociological studies of children, school meals and food poverty.     

A Boy’s Journey: Public Sociology for in and Out of the Classroom

This essay is a response to Stein (2019; 2020) and his use of lived experience to tell the story of violence and the Holocaust. I discuss these works’ contributions to public sociology and teaching.     

‘They Cry,Cry, They Want to go to School’: the Micro‐Politics of Asylum‐Seeking Children's Articulated Emotions and Belonging in Relation to the Swedish School

This study illustrates how asylum‐seeking children, through articulated emotions, respond to being affected by experiences that enhance or restrict their sense of belonging. The findings show that, owing to power structures and relations, the children's sense of belonging was made uncertain by temporal, situational and relational boundaries of belonging. However, through their articulations, the children also contested these boundaries. The study argues that the children were moved by their structural situatedness and that their articulated emotions demonstrated their micro‐politics. The study also visualises how children may be affected when their rights are not realised in their lived forms.     

‘Now,We Have the Same Rights as Men to Keep Our Jobs’: Gendered Perceptions of Opportunity and Obstacles in a Mexican Workplace

Drawing on extensive qualitative data at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation, this case study investigates professional employees’ perceptions of changes to a prohibitive work policy requiring women to quit working upon marriage and having children. Employees believed the policy change meant working women were valued employees, but how this translated into opportunity highlighted distinct views of the types of positions professional women could occupy at the company, reinforcing sex‐segregated job allocation. Whereas women's narratives pointed to cultural resistance, men's narratives attributed the dearth of women in higher level positions to their lack of professionalism and commitment to work. The work policy change only guaranteed the right for women to work as the company modernized to fit the neoliberal demands of the global marketplace. Now women faced the challenge of turning that right into career advancement in a traditionally masculine‐defined company. I argue that even with the policy change, gendered discourses on women in professional occupations constructed and maintained gender inequities in the workplace. This study contributes to the scholarly discussion on gendered discourses within the context of global restructuring by showing how mechanisms at work maintain gender inequity in the workplace.     

The Assessment Checklist for Adolescents — ACA: A scale for measuring the mental health of young people in foster,kinship, residential and adoptive care

The Assessment Checklist for Adolescents — ACA is a 105-item carer-report mental health rating scale, measuring behaviours, emotional states, traits, and manners of relating to others, as manifested by adolescents (ages 12 to 17) residing in various types of alternate care, as well as those adopted from care. The ACA was designed for population and clinical research with these young people, and for use as a clinical assessment measure. The ACA's content was largely derived from the Assessment Checklist for Children (ACC). Fifteen ACC items were modified to better reflect adolescent difficulties, and 25 additional items were derived using a combination of inductive and deductive strategies. Item and factor analyses were carried out on scores from a 136-item research instrument, obtained for 230 young people residing in long-term care (as part of the NSW Children in Care study). These data were supplemented by ACC scores obtained for 142 adolescents residing in treatment foster care in Ontario, Canada. A robust 7-factor model was identified among a core of 73 clinical item scores, accounting for 51% of score variance. Four of the factors replicate ACC clinical scales (non-reciprocal interpersonal behaviour; sexual behaviour problems; food maintenance behaviour; and suicide discourse), and three are unique to the ACA (social instability/behavioural dysregulation; emotional dysregulation/distorted social cognition; and dissociation/trauma symptoms). The ACA also contains two empirically-derived low self-esteem scales (low confidence; negative self-image) that are shared with the ACC. Initial data indicate that the ACA has good content, construct and criterion-related validity, as well as high internal reliability.