Prof. Cihan Tuğal will join us with a talk titled Politicized Megaprojects and Public Sector Interventions: Mass Consent under Neoliberal Statism on June 22, 17.00.

Megaprojects were central to job creation, mass housing, and legitimacy before their marginalization following the 1970s. They made an apoliticized, market-oriented, and less inclusive come back starting with the 1990s. Scholars have argued that megaprojects' turn away from issues of employment, and their focus on attracting tourists and professionals, are among the core traits of neoliberalism. Turkey, though once seen as a paragon of neoliberalism, problematizes this generalization. "Neoliberal statist" megaprojects have created jobs and residence for millions, and are at the core of popular consent for the Erdoğanist regime. Yet, this is not an idiosyncratically "Turkish," or even "emerging market," aberration. Trumpist US has also attempted a similar transformation, but failed. An analytical contrast with Erdoğanism demonstrates that some sociological factors so far underemphasized in the literature account for the frustration of Trump's ambitions. Megaproject-driven growth and popular consent, however, are fragile in Turkey itself. Emergent market countries' turn to "neoliberal statism" is unsustainable, but does precipitate the end of the neoliberal era. Theories of megaprojects and neoliberalism need to be critically reconstructed to make full sense of these dynamics.

Cihan Tuğal is Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Tuğal works on politics, economic change, and religion. His first book Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism (Stanford, 2009) studied pro-capitalist Islam and its popularization among the poor. In his second book The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism (Verso 2016), Tuğal analyzed Islamic movements and regimes in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and Iran. His most recent book Caring for the Poor (2017, Routledge) discusses liberalism's uneasy relations with charitable ethics. He now explores populism and revolution in the contemporary world system.

About the Series

Sociological Imaginations at Boğaziçi is dedicated to exploring contemporary issues with scholars and intellectuals whose paths have crossed with the department over the years either as students or lecturers. We believe bolstering a dialogue between the academia and the general public becomes more urgent in times like these when the consequential relationship between personal experiences and the wider society has become more evident rendering sociological imaginations more indispensable. It is in this spirit, the Department of Sociology is hoping to create a medium and space that unites a forum of contemporary public debate with the Department's reflections on the past and present of its intellectual depth and diversity, hence providing a fresh connection to its lineage.

You can click on the following link to register for Prof. Tuğal's talk:
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYpfuyvpzwtHNUgMpmYTvU9Uwwq3n_8EIE8