Date:
Time:
11:00am - 12:00pm
Location:
8400 Baltimore Ave., Suite 250, College Park, MD 20740
On Thursday, December 15 from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm, Prof. Gunes Ertan will present her work about social media and the 2013 Turkish uprising also known as the "Gezi Park" protests in a paper entitled "Networks for Collective Learning" at the START office. The talk will be followed by lunch and an informal discussion about social media and mobilization since 2013 in Turkey. The event is free and open to the public, but RSVP's are appreciated.
The June 2013 uprising in Turkey was unprecedented in many regards. According to some empirical studies, more than half of protesters had never participated in any form of collective action event before the June protests. In the absence of activism history, various online networks such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter acted as critical tools for sharing logistical information, and developing strategies for coping with police violence. Using firehose Twitter data on the June 2013 uprising in Turkey, Dr. Ertan's study aims at deciphering different functions of social media during collective action events and highlights how Twitter may have acted as a tool for collective learning.
Dr. Ertan received her Ph.D. from University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs in 2013. She currently is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her main research interest is the relationship between social networks and collective action within the contexts of social mobilization and policy.