(Un)Doing Neoliberal and Middle-Class Citizenry: Spatial Tactics, Responses and Strategies of Urban Youth in the AKP’s Turkey

Keywords: urban youth, middle class and neoliberal citizenry, spatial practices and tactics
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Situating itself in a context of the AKP’s shifting neoliberal-conservative political and economic model that left many young graduates in a world in which instability and unpredictability define their everyday lives, this paper examined spatial tactics, responses and subjectivities urban youth engage. Because AKP’s youth citizenship project glorifying Islamic ethics and guidelines in alignment with neoliberal capitalist values of production and consumption does only serve to expose the failures and dissolution of neoliberal organization of work and life, this article investigated how young graduates in the AKP’s neoliberal-conservative Turkey is (un)doing the terms and definitions of middle-class and neoliberal citizenship through developing and pursuing alternative urban youth subjectivities and practices