Women’s intra-household care burden is one of the main reasons behind women’s low employment rates in Turkey. Many empirical studies have tested this relationship by focusing on the existence of dependent household members, if any. They have largely overlooked the use of care services and the time spent on caring for dependent household members to evaluate women’s care burden.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between women’s care burden and employment prospects and status in Turkey from the perspective of access to care services and the time dimension of the care burden. This relationship is analyzed through the logit model by using latest available data from the 2014–2015 Time Use Survey. The article shows that the time spent by women caring for dependent household members, and access to care services, are the most important factors influencing women’s employment probability in Turkey. Benefiting from informal childcare services increases the employment probability of women approximately twenty-seven times, while benefiting from formal childcare services increases two times and informal adult-care services 2.6 times. Ensuring the accessibility of institutional care services improves women’s employment status by enabling women’s transition from part-time to full-time jobs, and from unskilled to professional jobs.

Women with children, on average, earn lower wages than those who do not have children. This is called the “motherhood wage penalty”. This study provides estimates of the wage penalty for working mothers in Turkey using the Turkish Household Labor Force Survey (HLFS), 2014–2018. The gross wage penalty is 21.3 percent, but it is entirely explained by human capital variables: education, marital status, and potential experience in the pooled cross-section. The bulk of the gross penalty is attributable to the higher educational attainment of the subsample of non-mothers compared to mothers. When the wage-setting mechanisms in the public versus private sectors, and differences in fertility exposure by age cohort conditional on education are accounted for, a clearer picture emerges. Empirical findings indicate that the wage penalty does not exist for mothers employed in the public sector but that there is a 3 percent penalty for mothers working in the private sector, with the highest value being 6.1 percent for university-educated young mothers. In addition, wage losses are higher for the younger age cohort, presumably due to leaves of absence from work for time spent caring for young children, which lead to skill erosion.

Reforming care regimes to cover the care deficit and enhancing the marketization of care to promote individualism and gender equality have been on the European agenda since the 1990s. However, both implementation and results have been path-dependent. This study first underlines some specificities in the Turkish case—namely, the limited welfare state, a large shadow economy, gender roles, patriarchal backlash, Islamization, and neoliberalism, all of which receive little treatment in the welfare state literature. It then analyzes how these specificities interact in the construction of the care regime in Turkey, conceptualizing the outcome as distorted commodification of care—namely, the continuing ambiguity of care services despite these activities producing precarity and positional suffering for caregivers and recipients. Finally, the study provides concrete examples from the less studied topic of long-term disability care. It presents a perspective on Turkey that foregrounds the connections between gendered care imagery and case-specific qualities of the commodification of care shaped by the long-standing shadow economy, the outsourcing of disability services to for-profit private companies, and the introduction of the cash-for-care policy. The study analyzes the outcomes of distorted commodification of care under these conditions in Turkey vis-à-vis visibility, valuation of work, working conditions, and gender inequality.

The aging population and, along with it, increasing long-term care needs create pressure globally on the social and health care spending of governments under the constraint of shrinking tax bases. The common tendency of governments is to minimize the cost by transferring the elderly care burden to families. However, care provision comes with penalties for caretakers in the form of potential income losses and a rising, unpaid workload that requires a gender-based assessment. These impacts intensify with additional demographic trends that impose new challenges. Increasing longevity accompanied by decreasing fertility and delays in having children in Turkey have contributed to the growth of the “sandwiched generation” which encounters the care needs of their elderly as they care for their children. This study investigates whether and how caring responsibilities can be associated with the caregivers’ economic participation in Turkey, where the retreat from institutional provisioning of elderly care services is concealed with a neoconservative family-oriented rhetoric. Using the 2014–2015 Time Use Statistics compiled by TurkStat, we analyze the relationship between informal elderly care provision and employment hours, taking into account the potential impact of providing elderly care on labor force participation, focusing on sandwiched- generation women.

In Infancy and History Agamben (1993) suggests, following Benjamin’s footsteps, that true experience is only possible in infancy, a time that has not yet been expropriated by the bareness of modern life. The kind of potentiality that he attributes to infancy signifies the emergence of a new self, which, rather than moving into the mechanical domain of “work,” prefers to remain in the creative territory of “play,” where it is possible to transform old societal structures into new ones.

Agamben’s approach to play and its non-chronological temporality offers useful clues in revealing the dynamics of the increasing number of contemporary childhood narratives in Irish and Turkish literature, where characters resist the linear structure of the bildungsroman and the corresponding model of progress, eventually forming a culture of adolescents resistant to maturity. Focusing on some common features of these novelistic characters, such as playfulness, self-experimentation, and messianic idealism, this paper argues that the return of children to contemporary Turkish and Irish novel opens a new terrain of possibilities that offer liberation from the poverty of experience Agamben attributes to modern society.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Europe was a popular migration destination for Turkish people due to its employment opportunities. Today, however, these labor market drivers of migration destinations in the EU-28 have been superseded. This article empirically investigates the drivers of the migration destinations of Turkish newcomers to EU countries between 2008–2018. It contributes to the literature by focusing only on Turkish newcomers, whereas other studies rely on migration stock data. Using data provided by the OECD, Eurostat, and the World Bank, the findings show that security-based and social drivers mostly attract Turkish newcomers to EU-28 destinations, specifically a demand for democracy and social networks.

Since the rise of the ruling Justice and Development Party in the early 2000s, Turkey has invested in several mega transport and infrastructure projects for the purposes of economic transformation, growth, and development. This article explores the impact of a recently completed mega-project—the Osman Gazi Bridge—on material change and popular imagination about the future. It claims that, while the Bridge created a colossal material change that can be observed by everyone, it also animated an imagined post-industrial transition and inclusive development in the industrial town of Dilovası. Although the dream of a better future serves as a medium for the industrial town’s underprivileged inhabitants to connect and socialize, along with the current marginalizing conditions, it also has the potential to fuel future resistance, if imagination is unable to be transformed into reality.