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Markets, Globalization & Development Review

Abstract

This article analyzes a recently emerging halal market in Turkey and illuminates how discursive strategies foster the halal movement in an Islamic culture, and in a neoliberal economy. By exploring websites of the Turkish halal regulatory institutions and employing critical discourse analysis of the media materials, I demonstrate how Islamic actors (halal certification institutions and businesses) adapt, appropriate, and contest different discursive strategies to achieve legitimacy, to compete for distinction and to acquire power in a newly emerging and fiercely competitive, yet a globally defined field in a national economy. The discursive contestations of the actors shaped by the ambivalent structure of the Turkish halal market and accompanied by the deregulation principal of neoliberalism create equivocal meanings of halal-ness, symbolic consumption and education in this emergent field.

Author Bio

Yeşim Kaptan is an assistant professor at the School of Communication Studies at Kent State University (Ohio, USA). She received her Ph.D. in Communication & Culture and Folklore/Anthropology (double major) from Indiana University, Bloomington. She earned her MA and BA in Political Science at Middle East Technical University in Turkey. Previously, Dr. Kaptan worked at Izmir University of Economics (Turkey). She was a visiting scholar at the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication (PARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark. She serves on the Editorial Board of the Cultural Studies and Media Dialogues: Journal for Research of the Media and Society. Her research interests are transnational media, global communication, culture industries, identity politics and consumer culture. She has published research in the International Journal of Communication, Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, the Journal of Consumer Culture, The Global Media Journal, and various English and Turkish media journals and books.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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