Assessing the disabled, making ‘the State’

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the contemporary framework and practices of disability classification and assessment in Turkey from a political anthropological perspective. The practices of assessment and classification are considered as governmental interfaces; that is, as determining the modes in which citizens encounter the state, and in which “the state” makes its population legible and governable. Disability as it is being re-defined, becomes an interface of encounters, which mutually construct new forms of statecraft and new forms of citizenship. The thesis maps out the forms of discourses and practices that emerge with this new classification framework in a three-fold perspective; first, from the perspective of governors, as the policy-makers who introduced this new framework; then from that of doctors and officers in a provincial state hospital, who take on the duty of assessors, day-to-day appliers of this new framework within the institutional conditions of state hospitals, which are undergoing a large-scale transformation; lastly, the thesis moves to the perspective of citizens, who apply for being assessed as disabled, to the everyday experiences of procedures of assessment and the mode of sharing these experiences online, through a which novel forms of disabled communities arise. Throughout this three-fold perspective, this thesis aims to map out a relational epistemology of state-making and cultural practices of experiencing the modern state. It is argued through this mapping, that the re-definition of disability within this new framework and the restructuring of the state-citizen relations in contemporary Turkey are co-constitutive, and the one cannot be understood without the other. Consequently, disability can no longer be understood only as a medical or social phenomena; it involves a complex interaction of bodies, cultures, politics and socialities.