Keyman Podcast

Mine Yıldırım is an assistant professor (Kadir Has University, Istanbul) of politics, researcher in urban and critical animal studies, and animal rights advocate. She received her PhD in Politics (2021) from The New School, New York, with a dissertation titled Between Care and Violence: Street Dogs of Istanbul, tracing the history and politics of Istanbul’s street dogs from the early twentieth cen...

In this episode, 2022-2024 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow Ekin Kurtiç has an insightful conversation with Caterina Scaramelli about her book How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey published by Stanford University Press in 2021. Drawing on her longterm ethnographic fieldwork in two deltas in Turkey – namely, Gediz on the Aegean cost and Kizilirmak delta on the B...

In this episode, I talked to two media and communication studies scholars, Ergin Bulut and Can Ertuna, about their new research on journalism during the pandemic in Turkey. Although the pandemic had an overall negative effect on journalism, their research also showed unexpected social effects of the pandemic. Due to the public interest in accurate information, sensational journalism and the media...

In this special episode, our new Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow Anoush Tamar Suni interviewed David Leupold on his new book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory, which explores the intertwined histories of Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish communities with a particular focus on the violent history of the Genocide of Ottoman Armenians in 1915. Moving throug...

A conversation with Zeynep Oğuz, a cultural anthropologist, about her work on oil in Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean, and COVID-19 from the perspective of environmental humanities. We talked about how nature, politics, and the economy are entangled in the multi-layered material of oil. Zeynep's work delves into the topics of oil in Turkey and the Kurdish Question simultaneously, bringing a fr...

A conversation with Seçil Yılmaz, a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the Middle East and an expert on epidemics. I talked to her about her research on syphilis in the late Ottoman Empire, early modern ideas of contagion, governmental techniques of regulating mobility, burial and mourning practices, gender, sexuality, and class in relation to health and disease. Seçil pointed out many paral...

In this episode, I had a wonderful conversation with Salih Can Açıksöz on his book Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey published by University of California Press in 2019. Can conducted ethnographic research with Turkish disabled conscripts who fought against Kurdish guerrillas in Turkey and Northern Iraq. We talked about the social dynamics of universal co...

In this episode, our guest was Ayşe Parla, and we had a very interesting conversation with her about her new book Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey published by Stanford University Press in 2019. We discussed how migrants from Bulgaria inhabit a liminal position between desirable migrants defined as racial kin and economically precarious subjects, whose belonging to...

In this episode, we talked to Élise Massicard about her research on muhtars, the neighborhood or village headmen in Turkey. Elise’s interest in muhtars in Turkey dates back to several years before President Erdoğan started to gather thousands of muhtars at his presidential palace, address them in person to acknowledge the importance of their position. Elise’s research problematizes the view of the...

In this episode, we talked to Ceren Lord about her book Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth of the Republic to the AKP, in which she questions the view of the grassroots Islamist movements as natural challengers of the authoritarian secular state in a novel way based both on her archival research and the interviews she conducted with state officials, influential religious figures, and the...

In this episode we hosted Can Candan, acclaimed independent documentary filmmaker and professor of film and media studies. Professor Candan was at Northwestern for the screening of his film Duvarlar-Mauern-Walls at the Block Museum and his talk on the current state of academic freedoms in Turkey. We took this opportunity to talk to him about the changing conditions of academic and artistic product...

Our guest in this episode is Elizabeth Nolte, Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick in the Institute of Advanced Study and the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. We talked about her new research on children’s literature and educational publishing, in which she explores how the state is attempting to consolidate culture within state inst...

A conversation with Çetin Çelik, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey about his work on social class, institutional habitus, and high school choices in Turkey, in which he investigates the effect of schools on the educational performance of working-class students. How do institutions other than the family shape cross-school behaviors, attitudes, aspirations, and a...