Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Yalçınkaya M. A. (Yürütücü), Seven G.
Yükseköğretim Kurumları Destekli Proje, BAP Araştırma Projesi, 2025 - 2026
In an era of growing concerns regarding public trust in science, public perceptions of science and scientists have acquired unprecedented significance. Since many key issues scientists focus on in the contemporary world have global social implications, and governments justify some impactful policies with reference to science, citizens become more concerned with the connections between policymaking and science, and the resultant perceptions of science as “politicized” create a setting for conspiracy thinking and “science denialism.” Moreover, the rise of right-wing populist political movements that often use religious rhetoric has given additional impetus to these tendencies, encouraging citizens to seek alternative, “authentic” sources of knowledge. Hence, it is of particular importance to explore how religious people perceive science and scientists in settings characterized by populist political environments, and devise appropriate and effective science communication strategies.This project aims to study how religious Turkish citizens perceive science and scientists. Turkey presents a crucial case in which to observe the impact of such a political setting on religious people’s attitudes, and whether “antiscience” attitudes exist among devout Muslims. Moreover, it explores the potential role gender plays in forming attitudes, since studies have consistently illustrated the diverse forms religiosity may assume due to gender differences. In order to get at the key concerns of our era, we focus on current issues where the alleged “politicization” of science has commonly come to the fore: the COVID-19 pandemic and mRNA vaccines, climate change, and the transforming understandings of sex, gender and sexuality. Often associated with conspiracy thinking and populist scepticism of science, these three issues constitute key targets for exploring religious people’s perceptions and attitudes. We study how devout Muslims perceive these issues and the potential connections among religion, politics, and science, and inquire the extent to which scepticism toward or mistrust in science prevails among them. We concluded an initial project about this topic in July 2024 where we focused on religious people in three “pro-government” cities of Turkey. Taking into account findings that illustrate contextual effects, in this project we focus on cities where “progovernment” constituencies are in the minority. This will allow us to develop not only a more comparative perspective that is cognizant of the diversity of religious Muslims in Turkey, but a much sounder, and a more generalizable, understanding of the attitudes of devout citizens.Assisted by a polling company, we will organize gender-segregated focus groups in three cities and establish settings for participants to express their views on science and Islam in general, followed by discussions on their views about the three topics referred to above. The discussions will focus on themes of trust in science and scientists in, and governmental policy on these issues, and what, in their view, constitutes the “Islamic” way of seeing them. Based on our findings, we aim to develop a broader project within the Horizon Europe scheme, and produce two articles to be submitted to one sociology and one political science journal.