• Screen Shot 2018-02-16 at 15.22.36 – Duygu Karatas

Duygu Karatas

Alumnus
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Duygu has completed her PhD at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster. Her PhD dissertation focuses on the social movement’s collective identity as an interactive and communicative construction process and investigates changing media practices and uses of Twitter in this process.

She led media and communication seminars at the University of Westminster as an Associate Fellow from 2015 till 2017. She worked as a visiting lecturer at the London College of Communication within the University of the Arts London and and taught Mapping Social Media, Digital Cultures; Digital Futures; Audiences, Publics and Networks modules in 2017-2018.

Duygu received Media and Communications Master of Arts degree from City University London Sociology Department as a scholar of Jean Monnet Scholarship Programme of European Union. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Middle East Technical University, with years of work experience in marketing, advertising and public relations.

Her research interests include the use of social media in social movements, collective identity and pluralism in the movements, the communication and media of social movements, political communication, post-truth and social media, radical democracy and new forms of resistance, alternative media, contentious politics, online activism, citizen journalism, freedom of speech, censorship and self-censorship.

Her motto is “Thought, for me, is just that: the courage of hopelessness.” in the words of Giorgio Agamben.

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Doctoral Project

Occupy Gezi’s Collective Identity and the Role of Twitter in its Construction.

My research project explores the political and cultural impacts of the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey through examining the Occupy Gezi movement’s collective identity as an interactive and communicative construction process and investigates the changing media practices and uses of Twitter in different stages of this construction process, from media ecology and media practices perspectives. Through 37 in-depth interviews and the analysis of these interviewees’ Twitter accounts based on their common followings, this empirical research bridges social movements, collective identity and media, focusing on the conceptions, experiences and media practices of the activists.