This Critical Ottoman & Post-Ottoman Studies (Co+POS) event was held on Tuesday, October 19th, 2021, as a webinar that featured Sinan Erensü from Boğaziçi University and Başak Can from Koç University as speakers. It was moderated by Begüm Adalet and hosted by Mostafa Minawi, both from Cornell University.
Sinan Erensü focused on the story of the Center for Spatial Justice (Mekanda Adalet Derneği, MAD), an Istanbul-based non-profit founded in 2016 for the study and advocacy of urban and environmental justice. As one of the founding members of the center, Dr. Erensü spoke about the joy and challenge of sustaining a research/policy center against the background of shrinking political freedoms and a narrowing academic space. Then Başak Can talked about the politics of ethnographic and medical research in Turkey. Against the backdrop of debates around rising authoritarianism in the country, she discussed ethical and political dilemmas researchers face when conducting research with human subjects. Dr. Can's talk ended with a reflection on the relationship between knowledge production and authoritarianism. The presentations were followed by a 30-minute Q&A session.
Sinan Erensü is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. His research and teaching areas include political ecology, urban and environmental sociology, climate justice, energy infrastructures, and speculative urbanism. He received his master's degree from the University of Cambridge and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota, both in sociology. Before joining Boğaziçi, he was a Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and a Mercator-IPC fellow at the Istanbul Policy Center. He is currently a Collaborating Researcher at an ERC H2020 project, “The Urban Revolution and the Political”.
Başak Can has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. She started working as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University in 2014. She is a medical anthropologist with an interest in the intersections of human rights, state violence, gender, politics of care and body. She is currently working on her book manuscript titled, Forensic Fantasies: Doctors, Documents and the Limits of Truth in Turkey. Her research has led to several publications in peer-reviewed journals including American Anthropologist, Medical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Reproductive Health Matters, New Perspectives on Turkey, Communication, Culture & Critique, andMedia, Culture & Society. She has also published articles in peer-reviewed journals in Turkish such as Toplum ve Bilim, Toplum ve Hekim and Moment Dergi.
Begüm Adalet is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. She is a political theorist with research and teaching interests in anticolonial thought, transnationalism, the Cold War, development, the built environment, and the Middle East. She is the author of Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford). Her writings have also appeared in Political Theory; Comparative Studies in Society and History; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; and Public Books.
Mostafa Minawi is the Director of Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies (CO+POS) and an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. His primary research interest is Ottoman imperialism in the Sahara, the Red Sea Basin, and the Horn of Africa and the lived experience of Ottoman imperialism in the Metropole, Istanbul. He ultimately seeks to provide an understanding of different forms of imperialism in the Middle East and Northeast Africa at the turn of the 20th century.
About CO+POS:
Housed within the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies (CO+POS) highlights the latest in innovative research about Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Europe—a region encompassing the Turkic world, the Ottoman Empire, and its successor nation-states.
CO+POS gives scholars, artists, and practitioners a platform for challenging traditional understandings of this part of the world. From novel perspectives on the Ottoman Empire's architectural heritage to critical policy analyses of current events, CO+POS offers fresh approaches to the study of the dynamic region at the center of the Afro-Eurasia continent.
