Sendika-Siyaset Ilişkilerinin Kesişim Noktasinda Öğrenci Sendikaciliği: Bir Siyaset Yapma Alani Olarak Genç-Sen
Student Unionism at the Crossroads of Trade-Political Relations: Genç-Sen as a Political Field

Summary/Abstract: The military coup of 12 September 1980 had many impacts on higher education and social movements in Turkey. The trade union movement had been damaged because of the legal regulations and restrictions and the closure of many unions and arrestment of most of the trade union activists. Students found themselves confronted with new discipline rules with the foundation of the Council of Higher Education and the restriction of scientific and administrative liberties in universities. In addition to this, the acceleration of the neoliberal economic policies in the country had effected not only the actors of the economic sphere but also the University. The students were pushed into precarity finding themselves faced to unemployment after graduation. Thus, trade unions and the students, major actors of the social protests before the 1980s, started to search for new organization and mobilization strategies in the 1990s by the normalization of the political life. The Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions, DİSK, refounded in 1991, triggered the process of the foundation of the first and till today the only student union in Turkey, Genç-Sen. Genç-Sen, founded in 2007, managed to continue its activities in spite of the legal interdictions in front of the foundation of a union by students and took its place as a new model of trade unionism where the collective action cultures of traditional and new social protest actors meet. Thus, the student youth has opened itself a new place to make politics through the trade unions' sphere by adopting the collective action repertories and discourses of the traditional leftwing activists while learning the student unionism. Therefore, Genç-Sen has become an important social protest actor in order to analyze the student unions and the political tendencies of the student youth. Along our study on Genç-Sen, we aimed to explain firstly of the legal regulations that have effects on the foundation process of the student union. Then, we tried to understand the point where the student unionism, social movements and the relations between politics and trade unions arrived by analyzing the functioning of Genç-Sen in 4 years' time.

• Details
• Contents