Dr. Fatih Kaya develops new concept to stabilize social inequality in everyday life

How are social inequalities stabilized in everyday life - even by people who experience discrimination themselves? Dr. Fatih Kaya explores this question in his new article "The Mediodoxy: A Bourdieusian Third Logic of Practice between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Lived Experience of Anti-Muslim Racism and Antisemitism", which has been published in the renowned journal Sociological Theory.

Based on Pierre Bourdieu's theory, Kaya develops the concept of "mediodoxy" as an intermediate form of social action: it stands between orthodoxy, i.e. agreement with existing orders, and heresy or heterodoxy, i.e. questioning them. This refers to ambivalent, often unconscious practices through which social inequalities are not openly defended, but also not consistently rejected.

For the study, Dr. Kaya analyzed 23 qualitative interviews with Jewish and Muslim people who have had anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim racist experiences. The study shows how symbolic power relations and social patterns of interpretation can be reproduced in everyday life - for example through silence, relativization, adaptation or the normalization of discriminatory situations.

With the concept of mediodoxy, Kaya expands Bourdieusian field and habitus research to include an intermediate logic of social practice that has received little attention to date. The article thus provides an important theoretical impulse for research into anti-Semitism, racism and inequality.

Link to the publication:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07352751261448520