Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Paris III (Sorbonne nouvelle), 1984. / French and Ottoman Turkish. Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-264) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität München. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 179-186).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Istanbul University. / Includes bibliographical references (399-406) and index.

Thesis--Hamburg. / Vita. Includes index. Bibliography: p. 96-98.

This dissertation examines the role of the social struggles and alliances in shaping the Constitutional Court rulings that structure core political controversies in Turkey. By adopting Joel Migdal’s State-in-Society approach, the Court is conceived as an organization that exists in an environment of conflict. By following a process oriented approach, this study analyzes the ways in which the relation between the Court and other actors influence the Constitutional Court of Turkey’s motives, capacity and manner of activism mainly during the period under the 1961 Constitution. This study argues that the limits of the Court’s power and its role in structuring the core political controversies that define and divide society can be explained by looking at the alliances formed between the Court and other actors. Alliances extend the jurisdiction of the Court by opening new avenues for political intervention and creating a support network for the reasoning and the justification of its rulings. By comparing the Court’s activism under the 1961 Constitution and under the 1982 Constitution, it is demonstrated that neither the nature nor the influence of these alliances remains static. In fact, this dissertation points out that we need to make a conceptual differentiation between two forms of alliances; strategic alliances and judicial coalitions. Strategic alliances refer to implicit alliances between the Court and other actors formed around an issue, whereas judicial coalitions refer to alliances based on a common normative framework and a shared identity. Whereas the Court’s activism in the first period is best described in terms of a strategic alliance, its activism in the 1990’s and 2000’s is best described with the term judicial coalition. / 10000-01-01

The Kurdish Question, which dates back to the Ottoman Era, has been a constituent element of narratives of Turkish nationalism for the past 30 years. The Kurdish Question stands as the most prominent “other” of Turkish nationalism. The members of two groups, Kurds and Turks, became highly politicised throughout 30 years of internal conflict and through their daily encounters, giving way to a constant redefinition of the understanding of nationalism and ethnicity. The encounters and experiences of these two groups have facilitated the development of various narrative forms of personal nationalism in daily life. Accordingly, the daily manifestations of the Kurdish Question and Turkish nationalism have grown as an object of academic interest. The question of how ordinary people produce – and are produced in – personal narratives of nationalism is a subject that still needs to be addressed, and this thesis aims to fill this gap by examining the notion of “personal narratives”. Analysing nationalism through personal narratives enables us to see how hegemonic nationalist ideology is reproduced and practiced by individuals through various dynamics. The thesis finds that the determining theme in the personal narratives of Turks and Kurds follows fundamentally the official ideology of the state about the Kurds, which is based principally on „a strategy of denial‟. The macro political transformations of the 2000s and the increased potential of encountering the “other” in daily life underline the challenging nature of this ideological strategy of denial. Herein, while the Turkish participants define themselves as the benevolent party in their nationalist narratives, they mark Kurdish people as terrorists, separatists and primitives. In contrast, the narratives of the Kurdish participants are characterised by the adoption of a “self-defence” strategy against the dominant negative perceptions of Turkish society about their culture: they assert that they are in fact not ignorant; not terrorists; not disloyal citizens, and so on. The narratives of the Turkish participants about the ethnic “other”, the Kurds, generally follow a strategy of contempt and accusation; yet personal experiences give them the opportunity to politicise the problem on different grounds by empathising or humanising. On the Kurdish side, the subjects of the personal narratives are more often the state and the army than Turkish individuals, and again they construct a narrative that endeavours to reverse the dominant negative perceptions about Kurds. They attempt to negate the denial strategy through both collective and personal stories of the discrimination they have experienced over the years and generations. Vital questions such as through which mechanisms of resistance do ordinary people construct and practice their ethnic identities, again become visible through their personal narratives.

The relationship between language and colour categorisation is explored testing the predictions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. The basic colour terms of Turkish are investigated, with findings suggesting that the Berlin and Kay (1969) theory of universal colour term evolution might require further revisions. The maximum number allowed by the theory is exceeded by the Turkish colour term inventory, by an extra term in the blue region. This difference between Turkish and English is exploited to test the effects of linguistic categories on colour perception and cognition. Evidence is presented suggesting that some aspects of categorical colour perception may not be fixed and universal, but flexible and culture-specific. Perceived similarity of colours seems to be open to influence by a linguistic category boundary. The argument of flexibility is further investigated using a category learning paradigm. Evidence suggested that perceptual and cognitive effects of colour category boundaries might be acquired through laboratory training. Subjects judge colours to be different more accurately when they come from different categories acquired in training than when they are from the same category. Mechanisms, which may be responsible for such flexibility, are explored in relation to findings in the literature. It is argued that perception and cognition may not be distinguished from each other by clear-cut boundaries. Rather, and interaction between percepts and concepts may facilitate effects of language and learning on human colour categorisation.

No description available.

This thesis examines the empirical impact of financial liberalisation on the performance of the Turkish economy over the period 1963–95. In particular, the effect of financial liberalisation on domestic savings and investment, the demand for money and the rate of economic growth are examined.

The purpose of this study was to detect Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers' perceptions of giftedness and factors affecting their referral decisions through eleven profiles (scenarios) originally created by five experts in the field of gifted education and semi-structured interview questions created for this study. The original profiles were translated from English to Turkish and adapted to be more relevant to Turkish culture. These profiles were named as Student Profiles Survey in this study. The profiles were varied based on characteristics embedded in each profile and I was able to create eight versions (pile) of the Student Profiles Survey. Profiles in each version (pile) of Student Profiles Survey differed from each other based on the characteristics embedded in each profile. Participants of the study were Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers who were attending two colleges of Education at Gaziantep University, namely Gaziantep College of Education and Nizip College of Education. A total of 204 Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers participated in the study and filled out the different versions of Student Profiles Survey. Approximately 25 pre-service teachers filled out each version of Student Profiles Survey. In addition, 16 of the pre-service teachers were asked for a follow-up interview. The convergent parallel mixed-methods design was used to shed light on the research questions. The findings from quantitative and qualitative analyses were combined to support each other and to better investigate Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers' perceptions of giftedness and factors affecting their referral decisions. The results of this study indicated that Profile 11 was the most appropriate and Profile 4 was the least appropriate profile for Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers' perceptions of giftedness. Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers explained their reasons for including the students in the profiles to gifted education programs mostly based on the personal, academic, and social characteristics of the students embedded in the profiles but they did not often referred students' characteristics when they were explaining their reasons for exclusion. Rather than explaining their reasons based on characteristics of the students, Turkish pre-service teachers increased their expectations and created excuses to underestimate the potentials of the students in the profiles when they were asked to explain their reasons for exclusion. The results of factorial ANOVAs indicated that Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers' referral decisions were influenced by the following factors: Students’ and pre-service teachers’ gender, students' ability areas, personality traits of the students, words describing the student, and students' length of passion.