From being a smallholder-based, food-producing country covering its basic needs, Iraq and the Kurdistan Region in Iraq (KRI) have become major importers of food. The sustainability of the agricultural sector has been systematically undermined by conflict, neglect, and mismanagement, as a result of which the capacity of its farmers to feed the population declined. Even though local policymakers, the international community, and the international organisations emphasise the potential of agriculture for food production, job creation, and income generation, they also tend to consider the current food system problematic because of an alleged low productivity that they relate to the existing smallholder system. For them, such system poses a lack of competences and skills of farmers, and a subsistence production orientation. This approach culminated in a policy-making process that offered land and water for capital investments, and thus neglecting the potentials and competencies of (small-scale) farmers. The concomitant neglect of the human dimension of agriculture, namely the family farm, is essentially the continuation of an economically and ecologically high-risk approach that may lead to a further decline of the sector’s ability to produce food for the local market.

This study examines the visual and verbal content of advertisements in women’s magazines published between 1980 and 1990 in Turkey. Based on content analysis, we established the categories of products and services, age, body parts, women’s roles, clothes, and locations. We determined the five most frequent words employed in all grammatical or lexical forms: beautiful (güzel), to live (yaşamak), new (yeni), skin (cilt), and young (genç). By examining the data through informal learning, the study looks at how consumer-oriented values were taught informally to women readers during a period when Turkey underwent integration with the neoliberal global economy. We argue that the advertisements in women’s magazines were effective both in terms of disseminating the dominant values of the era and in causing women to informally internalize the consumer-oriented values required for the development of the desired female subjectivities of an emerging neoliberal society.

Mainstream research often promotes women’s entrepreneurship as an effective solution to women's subordination at home and in the workplace whereas recent feminist and critical research questions the desirability of entrepreneurship for women and its potential for empowerment. This study adopts a critical approach to understanding how gender affects entrepreneurship, how the latter changes gender identity, and the consequences for gender equality and social change. Given the diversity and inherent contradictions in women’s identity constructions and strategies, and the need for more studies in under-researched contexts, we contribute to extant literature by showing the possibilities and limits of entrepreneurship in challenging gendered hierarchies within both the household and business environments in Turkey. From a social constructivist perspective, we focus on how women entrepreneurs construct their identities and navigate gendered practices. Based on narratives of women entrepreneurs, we have two sets of findings. First, women entrepreneurs construct their identities by positioning themselves between traditional femininity and the masculine nature of entrepreneurship in both personal and business relationships. Second, we observe that women are ‘doing gender’ through practices of ‘overworking’, ‘instrumental masculinity’, and ‘redoing gender’ by ‘reconfiguring conjugal roles’, ‘utilizing feminine qualities’, and ‘developing a sense of collective consciousness’. Our overall conclusion is that although women entrepreneurs aspire to challenge gendered hierarchies, and some succeed, the impact of these efforts remain limited.