Framing pain: printed articulations, terror, and political others in Turkey

<p dir="ltr">A number of particularly newsworthy massacres have occurred in Turkey during the rule of the Justice and Development Party (<i>Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi</i> aka AKP). These have influenced transformations in the processes surrounding politics and hegemonic media discourses concerning political others – not only Kurds but also the dissenters and civil rights activists in Turkey who support their political demands for recognition. This study focuses on three of these massacres: the Roboskî, Suruç, and Ankara massacres, which happened during the AKP’s third term of government (2011–2015). In particular this study describes the ways in which hegemonic media discourse presents the lives and deaths of these political others (whose demands for political recognition contradict those of the government) as precarious, whose pain, agony and struggle <i>ought not</i> to be felt, sensed or understood by the general Turkish public. My focus is on the media framing of these massacres, employed as case studies in terms of their print-media articulations.</p><p dir="ltr">My analysis reveals that the discourse of terror is one of the hegemonic regimes in the depiction of these political others and in the descriptions of these massacres, whose role is defined by media frames constituting them. Thus, this study will reveal how national hegemonic media framing occurs through ‘articulation’, centring on ‘nodal points’, which assign conditions of recognisability for these others, in terms of the norms of the discourse of terror. By doing so they build meaning in relation to these massacres and relate different elements to each other. In this way, my analysis aims to investigate the process of the discursive formation of political others in the Turkish press and to evaluate the role played by media articulations in constructing meanings.</p><p dir="ltr">In order to demonstrate the construction of meaning concerning the identity of these political others, I utilise discourse and hegemony analysis to reveal how such discursive regimes categorise, describe, regulate, and rule these others as well as manifest the discursive mechanisms in constructing their identities. In this respect, this thesis questions how these political others are represented within the discursive regime of terrorism, and which meanings are remembered regarding these massacres, through systems of signification and media articulation. In this regard, I show how mainstream media frames impede the Turkish public from feeling sorry for these political others and how the meanings concerning their deaths thus foreclose the potentiality for inquiry, concern and responsibility for these deaths.</p>