Turkish Modernization and the Child: Representation of Children and Childhood in Newspaper Advertisements in the Early Republican Period
Project no. 28539 · Status: Kapanmış · 2023
Summary
<p>The Republic of Turkey, a modernization project, aimed to reach the level of "contemporary civilizations" with the new perspectives it introduced in many areas of social life after its foundation and the new regulations shaped within the framework of these perspectives. Turning its face to science, the young Republic aimed to ensure that science would be a dominant guide in all areas of life, and to this end, it endeavored to raise the human resources that would foster science. The issue of children and childhood has been one of the most important issues in the early period of the modern Republic of Turkey, which was founded in 1923, until 1950. The main reason for this is that children will constitute the future generations and are seen as the individuals who will carry the modern way of life that the country wants to adopt into the future. With the Republican era, children became more visible in social life, and many areas from health to education policies began to be organized according to children. This new perspective on children and the policies implemented were also reflected in the mass media, especially in the printed media, which was the dominant media of the period. This study aims to reveal the perspective on children and childhood through advertisements, which were accepted as an important tool by the actors of the period in the dissemination of the modernization discourse in the early years of the Republic of Turkey. 491 advertisements published in the national daily newspapers Cumhuriyet, Vakit and Akşam between October 29, 1923 and December 31, 1949 were analyzed through content analysis. As a result of the research, it was seen that the "child" element was an important issue in the Early Republican Period, when the transition from traditional to modern was aimed, the modernization efforts seen in social life were reflected in advertisements, the visibility and importance of children were conveyed to a wide segment of society through advertisements, and the child was included in advertisements in accordance with modern values.</p>