Dicle Kogacioglu

My research project is based on a twenty-month ethnographic study in two locations i) three neighborhoods in an internally migrant urban poor district of Istanbul, ii) the mid-level civil court that has jurisdiction over these areas. The research project employed methods of participant and non-participant observation, in-depth interviews and content analysis in order to understand both how people imagine the law and how they act upon it. I have examined the way conceptions of legality and citizenship are constructed from below and maintained in everyday life legal encounters. The project combines this analysis with an exploration of the ways in which everyday interactions in the legal field reproduce social hierarchies and inequalities.

Studying these questions in the context of Turkey is particularly interesting because of its mixed legacy of both family and kinship networks and rule-of-law like aspirations to rational-bureaucratic forms of governing. In the everyday life of the law (in its inclusive meaning as an amalgam of rules, persons and institutions) the formal and the informal routinely interact for the practical solution of legal problems and resolution of disputes. In this enmeshing of the formal and informal inequalities are reproduced in multiple axes. While some of these axes such as education, gender or economic standing are rather established in scholarship others such as place of origin are more specific to the context at hand. By examining the mundane operation of the law and the ways in which inequalities are reproduced in this field, the project has become a study of practices of governing and their effects in terms of relations of power.