Locating the Dergah in civil society: the Alevi youth's counter public and civility

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1500476 (Table of Contents)

The fundamental objective of this thesis is to question the legitimacy of the prevalent assumptions of civil society with regard to who should constitute civil society and how the the experiences of the underprivileged are to be addressed through a scrutiny of micro social processes of power at the community level in a particular space. It is thus through an in-depth-analysis of informal youth activism within a politics of place- its dynamics, complexities, interactions, contestations, and normative orientations- that I have endeavored to show a possibility of context-specific patterns of civil society. The thesis is particularly concerned with unveiling some of the dynamics shaping the forms of public communication within the emergent autonomous space of the Alevi youth in the Şahkulu Sultan Dergahı via the modalities of counter public. It is the argument of this thesis that the Şahkulu youth has successfully constructed a counter public within the Dergah to formulate their oppositional interpretations of Alevi identity and their grievances with regard to the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by the people in power position while simultaneously constructing itself as an embryonic counter public vis-a-vis the general Alevi counter public. It has also built such a capacity of civility that epitomizes how-to-coexist with differences in a culturally diverse society as such.