Browsing by Author "Ozbek, Muge"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Citation - WoS: 2
Entangled Dependencies: the Case of the Runaway Domestic Worker Emine in Late Ottoman Istanbul, 1910
(Univ Coll London Press - Ucl Press, 2024) Ozbek, Muge
[No Abstract Available]
Everyday Life, Child Rearing, and Fatherhood in Ottoman Middle Class Families at the Turn of the 20th Century
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2026) Ozbek, Muge
Drawing on the personal diaries of two middle-class fathers, Memduh Bey and Ahmet Nedim Bey, this article explores the lived experience of fatherhood, child-rearing, and everyday life in the late Ottoman Empire. While existing scholarship has examined the modern family primarily through public discourse and prescriptive literature, this study utilizes rare ego-documents to reconstruct the private sphere. The analysis challenges the stereotype of the distant, authoritarian Ottoman patriarch, revealing instead fathers who were emotionally expressive, deeply engaged in domestic routines, and dedicated to their children's moral instruction. However, the article argues that this intimate fatherhood cannot be understood in isolation. It demonstrates that the fathers' ability to serve as playful companions and moral guides was structurally enabled by a gendered and classed infrastructure of care. This support system included extended kin networks, which provided essential material and emotional security, and the often-invisible labor of domestic workers and mothers, who absorbed the physical burden of daily childcare. By foregrounding these dynamics, the study illustrates how late Ottoman middle-class fatherhood was not merely a matter of sentiment, but a privileged role sustained by the labor of others. Consequently, this article contributes to the history of the Ottoman family and the global history of fatherhood by offering a textured understanding of late Ottoman middle-class fatherhood.
In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey
(Cambridge Univ Press, 2024) Ozbek, Muge
[No Abstract Available]
Citation - WoS: 2
Citation - Scopus: 2
Reconsidering Labor Coercion Through the Logics of Im/Mobility and the Environment
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2023) Bernardi, Claudia; Shahid, Amal; Ozbek, Muge
The 'new mobilities paradigm' formulated in the early 2000s allowed scholars of labor to explore the possibilities of the concept of im/mobility as an interpretive framework for understanding processes of work and labor. This paper contributes to the continued cross-fertilization between mobility studies and labor studies by exploring the theoretical and methodological prospects of focusing on assemblages of temporal- spatial practices that simultaneously compel and confine movement. The article suggests that means, processes, and extent of labor coercion can be understood by analyzing how people are compelled to move or are confined to specific sites temporarily or permanently. It discusses how employing space and im/mobility as conceptual tools uncover the role of diffused, hierarchical layers through which labor coercion emerges. In this regard, environment emerges as a significant factor. The paper examines how mobility becomes a line of flight from sites/fields of coercion, or locks people into new forms of coercive relations; the legal/ formal or informal frameworks that regulate or govern labor im/mobility within specific sites; and how the logics of deployment and coercion overlap and mutually reinforce one another. Ultimately, it aims to contribute to the calls for non-linear, newly spatialized histories of labor processes and labor coercion.
Citation - Scopus: 1
'we Have the Right To Work': the Rise of the 'national Economy' and Reformulating the Demands of the Women's Movement in the Pages of Kadinlar Dunyasi in the Post Balkan Wars Era
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2023) Ozbek, Muge
This article utilizes the first 100 issues of Kadinlar Dunyasi, published in 1913, to explore the emergence of new feminist discourse attributing women with new socio-economic roles, other than childrearing and household labor, in a general socio-historical context that was defined by the needs of a new national economy. The intention here is primarily to show how new visions of Ottoman womanhood emerged, radically different from the previous model of relatively modern, educated mothers and wives which had been promoted in former decades as novel, nationalist policies and projects of society began to unfold in the post-Balkan Wars era and to explore how these newer visions were represented in feminist discourse.