Ordering the Social – Producing Change: New Ethnographies of Turkey in Transformation

Conference organisers:

Nurhak Polat, Michi Knecht, Stefan Beck (Dept. of European Ethnology, Collaborative Research Unit 640, “Representations of Changing Social Orders”, Humboldt-University Berlin), Levent Soysal (Chair of the Dept. of Radio, Television, and Cinema, Faculty of Communication, Kadir Has University)

Discussants:

Ferhunde Özbay (Dept. of Sociology, Boğaziçi University), Niyazi Kızılyurek (Dept. of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cyprus), Michi Knecht (Dept. of European Ethnology, Humboldt-University Berlin), Levent Soysal (Faculty of Communication, Kadir Has University Istanbul)

The relationship between order and change has been vexing the social and cultural sciences for long. The classics in social theory have usually privileged the analyses of institutionalized order over that of change. During modernity and thereafter, however, change has been normalized to a degree that now stability can be pictured as „the troubling exception from the rule“ (Bruno Latour). Recent approaches within the anthropology of practice and knowledge, science and technology studies and the sociology of associations therefore analyse (dis)order and change, the mobile and the immobile, symmetrically. At the same time, they have shifted attention away from questions of social (dis)order as such towards practices and processes of ordering. This move puts reflecting and intervening actors and their knowledge production center stage, but also materialities, infrastructures and the linkages between them.

The workshop “Ordering the Social – Producing Change: New Ethnographies of Turkey in Transformation” employs such a bipolar perspective on the interlinked practices of “ordering the social/performing stability” and “doing change” in thinking through new ethnographies of Turkey. Turkey today is a society characterized by profound change as well as by the “glacial weight of what appears to be bounded and static” (Stephen Greenblatt). The workshop brings cultural and social scientists from Turkey together with international ethnographers and discusses qualitative research on current transformation processes in Turkey in the context of local and global constellations. As the intensifying European debate regarding the entry of Turkey into the EU often represents Turkey as the “Other” of Europe, i.e. as an alterity that serves to cement supposed European self-conceptions and certainties, the workshop intends to do the opposite: It will debate, what an expanding Europe can learn (and learn to question) from the unique and dynamic position of Turkey in current transformation processes.

The lectures on Friday are open to the public. If you wish to attend the workshop on Saturday, too, please rigester with the organizers.

Conference Program

Friday, June 24

Zafer Yenal
Chair of the Department of Sociology, Boğaziçi University

Introduction and workshop welcome
Stefan Beck, Maren Klotz, Michi Knecht, Nurhak Polat
Ordering the Social: Extended Case Studies and the Ethnography of Persistency and Change

10:15

Coffee break

10:30 – 17:00  

Ordering the Social: Emerging Forms of Participation/Obligation and New Subjectivities

10:30 – 12:30

Enacting critique, tradition and reform

Ståle Knudsen (Dept. of Anthropology, University of Bergen)
Popular resistance against energy projects in the Black Sea region of Turkey. Reforming the social and cultural landscape of a conservative region?

Dikmen Bezmez (Dept. of Sociology, Koç University Istanbul)
The emergence of disability-oriented institutional  frameworks under the roof of Istanbul’s government: reproducing the idea of the “needy” disabled

12:30      

Lunch

14:00 – 16:00    

New formations of participation

Erkan Saka (School of Communication, Bilgi University Istanbul)
Introductory ideas for an ethnography of emerging cyberspheres in Turkey

Barış Ülker (Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University)
Ordering the social and producing change through the “ethnic entrepreneurs”

Nurhak Polat (Dept. of European Ethnology, Humboldt-University Berlin)
“Going Concern”: New Forms of Participation and Biosociality

16:30 – 17:00    

Comments:
Ferhunde Özbay (Dept. of Sociology, Boğaziçi University Istanbul)

19:00             

Dinner

Saturday, June 25

09.00     

Coffee break

09:15 – 13:30   

Producing Change: Negotiations with the Past – Engagements with Possible Futures

09:15 – 10:45    

Policies of Change

Banu Karaca (Sabancı University, Istanbul)
Contemporary cultural policy in Turkey: Policy by default or design?

Ebru Kayaalp (Faculty of Communications, İstanbul Şehir University)
“Law as gift”: an ethnography of law-making in Turkey

Tuna Kuyucu (Boğaziçi University Istanbul)
Perpetuating poverty and marginality through “Urban Transformation” in Istanbul

10:45            

Coffee break

11:00 – 13:00    

Redistributing Sameness and Diversity

Esra Özyürek (Dept. of Anthropology, UC San Diego)
Turkish and christian: secularist fears of a converted nation

Sabine Strasser (Dept. of Anthropology, University of Vienna)
Transformations of honor: epistemic and cultural violence in Turkey and the EU

Aysim Türkmen (Arts and Design Faculty, Yıldız Technical University Istanbul)
The Panoramic Conquest Museum

13:00 – 13:30    

Comments:
Niyazi Kızılyürek (Dept. of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cyprus, Nikosia)   

13:30       

Lunch

14:30 – 18:00   

Embodying Transformations: Actors, Knowledge and Technologies in Circulation

14:30 – 16:00    

Actors of change and new forms of knowledge in the medical sectors

Aslıhan Sanal (European Molecular Biology Laboratories, Hamburg)
Transplanting the alien organ: Subjectivities in Turkey’s changing biopolitical landscape

Maral Erol (Thompson Writing Program, Duke University, Durham)
Transforming the menopausal Turkish woman and her medical responsibilities

Ayşecan Terzioğlu (School of Nursing and Health Sciences, Koç University Istanbul)
Grassroots Cancer Patients’ Organizations and Biological Citizenship

16:00    

Coffee break

16:30 – 17:30    

Making connections

Stefan Beck (Dept. of European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin)
Biomedical mobilities – transnational lab-benches and cosmopolitan sub-politics?

Brian Silverstein (Dept. of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tuscon)
Technologies of commensuration. Statistics, reform and society in Turkey

17:30 – 18:00    

Comments:  
Michi Knecht (Dept. of European Ethnology, Humboldt-University Berlin)

18:00    

Coffee break

18:30 – 19:30   

Final Discussion and Concluding Remarks

Comments and Conference Summing up:
Levent Soysal (Dept. of Radio, Television, and Cinema, Faculty of Communication, Kadir Has University Istanbul)

19:30   

Closing and reception

Informations and contact: michi.knecht@rz.hu-berlin.de and nurhak.polat@staff.hu-berlin.de