Authoritarian neoliberal policies are increasingly shaping contemporary research activities in Turkey and beyond. Political and financial pressures on researchers prevent them from addressing urgent topics and themes. Notable voices are sidelined by a lack of funding, and research projects are increasingly realized in a particularly conservative tone, lacking imagination.
We believe that salient research activity is necessary for informed critical decision-making processes, public engagement and educational activities. We therefore initiated an alternative network of non-traditional, multidisciplinary collaborative research processes at RIT.
Our goals:
- Addressing urgent topics which are not adequately studied
- Using interdisciplinary methods and approaches beyond traditional disciplinary academic boundaries
- Forming new working groups and initiate cross institutional working groups, and promoting collective action.
- Creatively and systematically engaging with civil society
By opening up a new intellectual space, we aim to assemble collective energy and capacity and provide resources for researchers and practitioners.
Our specific contributions:
- Collectivizing research efforts
- Consolidating topical research
- Tracking recent news & progress
- Triggering new research
Collective Memory
Memory studies address the interplay between the past and the present within multilayered contextual perspectives. We believe that collective memory is an arena of struggle. Radically commonizing memory enables us to draw connections between seemingly unrelated historical events. After all, a transformative struggle can only emerge from collectively reconstructing and reclaiming memory.
We focus on registering the continuities and discontinuities of the existing narratives and contributing to the development of alternatives; ones that register and reveal the experience and memory of social segments that are not in power. Ultimately, it is an empowerment project that operates through the re-definition of the past, present and thereby fuels the imagination of a future based on the actual accounts of the commons.
How do we create a collective memory that opens new paths to the unspoken or ideologically censored areas of history? We believe that oral history with its intuitive radical roots gives us a chance to base a foundation of a commonized memory – a perspective of underrepresented and unspoken. It allows us to deconstruct history as an ideological tool of the State and nourishes a new era of collectively democratized record of our recent history.
Supported Projects:
- 1980 Coup D’etat Oral History Archive
- Memory Museum for Historical Justice
- Devrimci Yol Archive
- Sites of Memory
Aesthetics and Politics
Relationship between art and politics is one of RIT‘s research areas both in its theoretical and practical forms. We recognize the political potentials and limits of artistic practices that reflect and intervene in societies. We aim at facilitating artistic work and radical research to explore, criticize and push the boundaries between arts and politics in creative and progressive ways.
With liberatory power of commonizing practices in arts, we aim at providing creative platforms for artists and critics to further their practices free from oppression, censorship, self-censorship and precarization. This group will also build networks in the art communities in the US and other countries to further opportunities for artists working on subjects covering various forms of discrimination, social and economic injustices, human rights issues, immigration and political repression.
Supported Projects:
- Do All Daddies Have Gray Suits?
Urban Justice and Right to the City
Construction, transportation and energy projects are the key drivers of economic growth as well as a central mechanism of rent-generation/distribution in Turkey. They have triggered severe social and environmental consequences including mass displacement of local neighborhoods, destruction of the social fabric, reduced life and ecosystem quality, and increased environmental vulnerability.
In recent years, protests all across Turkey have drawn attention to the dismal side-effects of this trajectory. We aim to contribute to the urban struggles through fleshing out alternatives, thereby paving the way from an anti-government sentiment to a creative and collective imagination of the local in Turkey.
Supported Projects:
- Biosphere 4R
- Water Scarcity & Poverty
Academic Freedom
Turkey’s academia has been going through a challenging transformation since the 1980s. The most recent steps towards a radical change at the level of university structures, followed by the total purges in and from the universities attest to the final stage of this transformation. The transformation has been managed in accordance with the requisites of the wider neoliberal socio-economic structuration. The authoritarian element that is endemic in neoliberal policies has assumed an increasingly pivotal place in this transformation-cum-structuration process.
The severe violations of academic freedom in Turkey have consistently increased in the past decade and reached unprecedented levels by the dislocation of increasing number of academics from knowledge production sites since 2016. Coupled with the rising tide of fascistic line in politics this dislocation directly affected the means that academics resort to in analyzing socio-political phenomena.
This group aims at offering a platform to search for the ways, styles, and sites for traversing the academic dislocation in Turkey with resort to the language in, and space of, and the reflections on the possibilities for alternative methodology. In so doing, we opt for carving out a space that accommodates the words, experiences and readings, silenced down in social science researchscapes in the course of the development of fascistic lines in politics.