PhD De­fence – Seyda Bag­dogan Beck­man

In order to obtain the PhD degree, Seyda Bagdogan Beckman has submitted her thesis entitled:

Recognition Labor and Platformed Domesticity

Self-Formation and Gendered Negotiations among Turkish Muslim Women

Digital media have increasingly shaped our everyday lives and how we relate to ourselves and others. Focusing on how Turkish Muslim women, mostly from traditional backgrounds, bring their cooking practices to digital platforms, this research examines how platforms both mediate and form part of their struggles for recognition within patriarchal power relations. Drawing on digital ethnography, including in-depth interviews with 20 women and analysis of their content, it shows how women develop self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem as their invisible and unpaid domestic competencies become visible through platforms, opening up possibilities for monetization and enabling women to exercise agency. At the same time, platform governance structures, with their own systems of recognition shaped by algorithms and monetization, reproduce the denial of recognition for women’s competencies, often requiring women to navigate and renegotiate their moral values. Through experiences of recognition and misrecognition in both digital and domestic labor, women develop reflexive capacities regarding their labor and their positions within male-dominated kinship, society, and the state. This research extends scholarship on gendered platform labor by conceptualizing recognition labor and platformed domesticity. These concepts explain how platform-mediated domestic practices generate experiences of recognition and misrecognition, and how these experiences shape self-formation within particular sociocultural and gendered contexts, especially in the Global Majority.

The thesis will be available from research.cbs.dk

 *The CBS PhD School will host a reception, which will take place immediately after the defence.