OHO Participants Release Gezi Resistance Blog

On the last day of IPS Foundation’s 5 day program, OHO participants published a Gezi Resistance blog on a variety of themes at oho2013.wordpress.com

The program hosts 24 new journalist candidates from 22 different universities, allowing them to interact with and learn from media professionals and academicians from various backgrounds.  

OHO’s young journalist candidates attended a workshop yesterday, finding the opportunity to practice what they have learned so far during the program in the form of a blog. 

OHO participants broke into 4 different groups to publish sub-blogs under Gezi Resistance main theme. 4 sub-blog themes were listed as follows: Woman Stories of Gezi, Gezi Resistance and Kurdish question, Gezi Resistance through local business owners’ perspective and Gezi humor. 

Assisted by Dr. Altuğ Akın, Alper Gedik, Burak Doğu (Bahçeşehir University) and Murat Çelikkan (journalist), OHO’s journalist candidates went out in the field to collect story written and visual content. 

Launching the blog www.oho2013.wordpress.com with 4 different themes, OHO participants found the opportunity to provide news content by both working on multimedia platforms and right-based journalism. 

Did we make peace after Gezi? 

Departing from the question whether or not Gezi Resistance made any change on people’s opinion on Kurdish question, the first group (Alara Kuset, Evren Kızılağaç, Ümüt Aggül, Umut Sinan Özdemir, Uğur Şahin Umman and Özgün Çağla) has conducted a series of interviews in Abbasağa Park. http://oho2013.wordpress.com/baris-sureci/ 

Woman Stories of Gezi

The second group (Irem Dönmez , Ece Tepeli, Esra Özdilim, Atlas Sibel Arslan, Didem Eker and  Kyra Mengeş) revealed the stories of women in Gezi Park - a group that constituted a fundamental part of the movement. http://oho2013.wordpress.com/kadin/

Gezi through local business owners’ perspective 

Interviewing several local business owners around Taksim Square, the third group (Cansu Kaşıkçı, Gizem Aysel, Halit Taşcan, Mehmet Ali Yavuz, Muhammet Tunç and Yağmur Taşdemir) portrayed how third party local business were affected from police violence and they viewed the Gezi Resistance. http://oho2013.wordpress.com/esnaf/

#DirenMizah (#ResistHumor)

The forth group (Hilal Yilmaz , Zeynep Yüncüler, Nazan Ertürk, Osman Girgin and İlke Çuhadar) interviewed Turkey’s prominent humor magazine Penguen to illustrate the role of humor in Gezi Resistance. http://oho2013.wordpress.com/mizah/

4 groups attended critique sessions following the completion of their work. Critique sessions were held by Prof. Dr. Özden Cankaya, Füsun Özbilgen (Galatasaray University),  Murat Çelikkan (journalist), Coşkun Efendioğlu (Milas Önder newspaper) and Neslihan Özgüneş (TACSO). 

“OHO broke prejudices”

A 15-minute wrap-up session reveled that OHO participants broke their prejudices and felt stronger about their future career that most of them were feeling uneasy to attend. 

OHO participants also formed a Facebook group called “OHO 2013” in order to facilitate future communication. (CK/HK/BM)