Ripping through a storified place: an exercise in critical breaking

ABSTRACT

This paper is an exercise in critical breaking. We take the promotional material for a newly ‘rejuvenated’ area in Ankara, Turkey, and tear out images and text. This is not to re-assemble a critical story of the urban development project; instead, we seek to mirror the process of its marketing. We explore the dynamic shifting and splintered nationhood constructed and marketed in this tourist site. This project is distinct in embracing its fragmented-ness into what/if space, embodying divergent historical trajectories. It implicates a speculative aspect, which is consequential for the political imagination reflected within the site. We use zine, as a mode of presentation, which with its DIY ethos mounts a polyvocal critique of stagecraft and a feminist-inspired challenge to heritage storytelling.

KEYWORDS:

• Zine
• collage technique
• heritage marketing
• place marketing
• non-representational methods
• feminist methodologies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2147981

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. inspired by George Eliot in Adam Bede (1859).

2. see e.g. Introduction to VanguardZine made by and for the LGBTQ Vietnamese community.

https://www.vanguardzine.com/

3. see Gears for Queers’ ‘Fat Cyclist Zine: Call and Tutorial’ https://youtu.be/oeC_dQ2qdUg.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olga Kravets

Olga Kravets is a senior lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests lie with the historical, socio-cultural and political aspects of consumer culture. Her previous research examined classed consumption, materialities of marketing, and the intersection thereof with politics and state ideologies, and has been published in the Journal of Marketing, Business History Review, Journal of Marketing Management, Ephemera, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Material Culture, as well as edited books. She has recently co-edited The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture.

Eminegül Karababa

Eminegül Karababa is an associate professor of Marketing at the Middle East Technical University. She received her doctorate from Bilkent University. Her research mainly explores the sociohistoric and sociocultural development of markets and consumer cultures. Specifically, she is interested in the historical development processes of markets, consumer cultures and consumer subjectivities in the Ottoman Empire. She has been working on the value creation processes in the contexts of markets and commodity networks. She served as the Editor for the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. Eminegül’s research is published in Economic History Review, Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Theory, Consumption Markets and Culture, and Journal of Historical Research in Marketing.