Keyman Podcast

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 production in Turkey in the last few years.

Can Candan is an independent filmmaker and a lecturer at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. He has a BA from Hampshire College in film and video, and an MFA from Temple University in film and media arts. As a filmmaker since 1989, his works have been screened internationally at festivals, conferences, schools, universities, in galleries, cinemas, and on television. He has taught film courses and workshops, both in universities and media education centers in the United States and in Turkey. He is a founding member of docIstanbul Center for Documentary Studies which organized the 2010 Visible Evidence International Documentary Studies Conference at Bogazici University in Istanbul.

We recorded this episode on January 24th, 2019 and the situation has only got worse since then. Academic for Peace Prof. Dr. Füsun Üstel became the first academic to be imprisoned for having signed the peace declaration. On May 8th, she submitted herself to Eskişehir Women’s Closed Prison after her prison one year and the months prison sentence was upheld by the court of appeals.

#FreeFusunUstel

Academic for Peace, Assistant Professor Dr Tuna Altınel from Lyon I University Department of Mathematics was arrested on charges of terrorist propaganda for his participation in a conference in France. He was detained on May 11th while filing an application regarding his passport ban at a police station in the city of Balıkesir.

#FreeTunaAltinel

The lawsuits have been continuing while other academics have also been detained and released arbitrarily.

An article summarizing the most current situation: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/01/about-700-academics-have-been-criminally-charged-turkey-their-signatures-petition?fbclid=IwAR3BFUtUqZw_O9XqfE5jcSfFChDY9BwyKbRC_d4TH-uvE-JHBf8KqL-YGBg#.XR0OcBrjFsg.facebook

To support Academics for Peace:

https://barisicinakademisyenler.net/English

https://twitter.com/BarisAkademik

https://twitter.com/WfF_Deutschland

https://twitter.com/ACADEMICBOYCOTT

https://www.facebook.com/barisicinakademisyenler/

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 institutions such as the ministries of culture and education and also pro-government corporate holdings, and how this is being opposed by the publishing industry and the affiliated NGOs. Who is defining Turkish culture and cultural literacy for youth in Turkey? How do the practices of censorship today compare to the censorship of the previous periods such as the years following the 1980 coup d’état when most of the publishing houses were founded? How could should we understand the antagonistic existence of severe censorship alongside the simultaneous explosion of cultural production?

Elizabeth Nolte's broader research focuses on literature and politics, censorship, and bureaucracy in modern Turkey and the post-Ottoman region. She recently completed a PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington and holds an MA from Columbia University. Her current project, “Fighting Words: Censorship and Literature in Contemporary Turkey,” investigates the antagonistic coexistence of censorship and literature and how cultural production draws on transnational writer-activist networks.

https://warwick.academia.edu/ElizabethNolte

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/people/wirl/nolte/

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 academic performances of the students? Why do they choose different school types? How do the institutional character of these different school types change over time the way students think, behave, and make choices about their futures?

Currently, Professor Çelik is a Fullbright visiting scholar at the Weatherhead Institute, Harvard University. His new project on Syrian refugees comparing how the same refugees in different countries are responding to stigmatization in different country contexts, focusing on Lebanon, Turkey, Germany, and the United States.

https://wcfia.harvard.edu/cetin-celik

https://ku.academia.edu/ÇetinÇelik

https://cssh.ku.edu.tr/en/people/personel-detail/?user=ccelik