Kulüp kültürleri ve DJ'in yaratıcı ve kültürel emeğinin metalaşması: Türkiye'nin gece hayatı merkezi olarak İstanbul

This thesis, while drawing on the cumulative and changing literature on cultural production and cultural and creative industries, aims to depict the creative labour practices adopted by İstanbul-based DJ's as part of the larger club cultural production environments. Cultural and creative industries make up for a fruitful area of study under post-Fordist capitalist modes of production in their potential to depict the broader shifts in new forms of labour. Club cultures and electronic dance music, with having their roots in marginalised youth subcultures which were once deemed deviant, became one of the most popular and profitable branches in the entertainment industry and are closely interlinked with subcultural capital. However, the popularity they have risen to in the last thirty years in both Turkiye and the global context has resulted in the appearance of features that are innate to the commodification processes in cultural production and consumption. Under the highly casualised conditions of the subcultural production terrain which is live performance in electronic dance music, DJ's as the main actors of a club night are subjected to the flexible, individualised, casualised and precarious labour practices that are characteristic to cultural and creative work and in another term, symbol making practices. Therefore Istanbul, as the flagship of Turkiye's club cultural scene was found worthy of interest and fourteen DJ's were interviewed with a semi-structured questionnaire in hopes of unveiling these very conditions and their subjective experiences in their club cultural production.