Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
5. Uluslararası Uygulamalı Etik Konferansı , Ankara, Türkiye, 19 - 21 Kasım 2025, ss.32, (Özet Bildiri)
This article explores how digital media infrastructures reshape public emotions, representations of violence, and multispecies ethics through the contested figure of stray dogs in Türkiye. Framed within the lens of environmental ethics, the study interrogates how viral dog attack videos, emotionally charged hashtags, and politicized news content construct stray dogs simultaneously as sentimental emblems and ecological threats. Drawing on affect theory and the “post-animal” framework, it demonstrates how digital platforms algorithmically circulate fear and anger, producing a moral panic that legitimizes biopolitical interventions such as mass confinement and euthanasia. Conceptualizing stray dogs as figures of “killable life”, the article reveals how digital affect economies mediate the ethical boundaries between compassion and control, and how these dynamics intersect with broader urban ecologies, spatial justice, and human—nonhuman relationalities. In response, it foregrounds counter-discourses, including activist storytelling and the relational rhetoric of itperestlik—a hybrid term denoting “dogworshipping”—which reframe stray dogs as political and ethical subjects embedded in affective networks of care. Ultimately, the article calls for a renewed environmental ethics that takes seriously the entangled lives of humans and nonhumans in the algorithmic governance of shared urban habitats.