Maysa Albert (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München)
Seen from the Edge: Istanbul’s Last 100 Years from the Perspective of Its Peripheries

3d-isometric-map-of-istanbul. Photografer: Maksim Grebeshkov.

This project is centered around a compelling proposition – the imperative to rethink and retheorize the intricate interplay between urban centres and peripheries, as well as the concept of the “periphery” itself.

The objective is to explore urban patterns and elements from a historical perspective, focusing on three distinct peripheries of Istanbul – Alibeyköy, Beykoz, and the land walls – analyzing the shifting discourses within them, connecting social dynamics and physical aspects, forging connections between social dynamics and physical aspects in the context of a global city. By connecting social dynamics and physical aspects within the context of a global city, this project aims to identify spatial and discursive transformations and gain insight into Istanbul’s history from the perspective of its margins, uncovering the city’s power relations.

To accomplish this, the research will thoroughly examine various criteria, including accessibility, economic flows, infrastructure, and population structure, to elucidate the hybridity that arises from urban public spaces. This hybridity blurs the traditional boundaries between centers and peripheries, thus emphasizing the flexible and dynamic nature underlying conventional urban design concepts.

The outcomes of this project will be presented in the form of customized, web-based maps that allow for essential statistical analyses. Additionally, the project will employ story maps to detail the events, issues, trends, and patterns concerning the identified peripheries, drawing from a vast collection of geodata accessible 24/7.

By exploring the complexities of Istanbul’s peripheries and their development over the last century, this research strives to contribute to the broader academic discourse on urban studies. The project’s emphasis on the significance of peripheries in shaping power structures will shed light on previously understudied aspects of Istanbul’s urban history, leading to a more nuanced understanding of urban development.

Burcu Yaşin (Concordia University, Montreal)
Volume Up, Volume Down: Sonic Gentrification and the Tuning of Romani Music in Turkey

The Clarinet player Eyüp and his son perform together in front of their home in Sargöl, Istanbul. Photographer: Paolo Buatti

This project traces the sonic impacts of gentrification. Gentrification continues to be a global problem in today’s cities. Irrespective of geographies and cultures, it mostly impacts vulnerable communities. Displacements affect these communities’ livelihoods, social networks, and economies, causing further marginalization in everyday life. Only recently scholars have begun to address the impacts of gentrification on local cultures and artistic practices, mainly focusing on their disappearance and subsequent replacement. However, gentrification may lead to homogenization of both local culture and space without necessarily eliminating cultural practices. Space, in fact, is particularly important for music cultures relying on informal learning, community-oriented performance, non-notational systems, and improvisation. Massive spatial transformations in the urban realm due to gentrification, instead of simply causing the disappearance of such practices, therefore engenders radical change in music cultures worth being examined in depth.

My project aims at answering the question of how government-sponsored urban policies impact and homogenize marginalized music cultures, with a specific focus on Turkish Romanies. The project addresses three main issues overlooked in the existing literature: (a) the connection between urban politics and marginalized music cultures, (b) the impact of gentrification on music performance and knowledge transmission, and (c) the homogenization of music styles and practices due to the spatial transformation. To analyze these issues in depth, my project elaborates on the concepts of acoustemology (sonic way of knowing connected to the everyday), atmospheres, and sonic gentrification, while combining several research methodologies such as archival research, oral history, and sensory ethnography.

Berkay Uluç (University of Michigan, Comparative Literature)
Translingual Ottoman Modernity: Texts, Concepts, and Media

Figure: Hikâye-i Robenson, Milli Kütüphane, 06 Mil EHT A 35981

With translation as its focal point, my project argues that understanding Ottoman modernity requires one to particularly attend to but also necessarily go beyond Turkish-Arabic cultural contact. In so doing, it situates the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century connections and contestations between Turkish and Arabic within the larger context of multilingual, multiscript, and multimedial interactions within the Ottoman Empire and between the empire and Europe. Shaped around four themes—namely, “history,” “language,” “literature,” and “aesthetics”—my project draws on a set of archival sources from legal proclamations to philosophical treatises to translated literature to illustrated journals. Documenting Ottoman modernity through and beyond Turkish-Arabic contact, these archival registers embody a wide variety of translation practices between “native” and “foreign” languages, scripts, and media in their material structures as well as between “classical” and “modern” epistemologies, genres, and vocabularies in their conceptual universes. One case study I am working on is Hikâye-i Robenson—Ahmed Lutfi’s 1864 Arabic-to-Turkish translation of Robinson Crusoe, which is canonically considered the first novel in English. Accompanying the Perso-Arabic script of Ottoman Turkish in the 1869 edition of Hikâye-i Robenson is a series of visual and textual elements copied from a Greek translation of the novel, including those revealing the power relations between the protagonist and his “servant” Friday. Using the methods of comparative literature, translation studies, and book history to analyze such “translingual” marks born by the texts of late Turkish-Arabic contact—materially, upon the page, and conceptually, in their content—I offer to explore Ottoman modernity in its hegemonic and heterogeneous facets at once. While standing at the intersection of critical Ottoman studies and critical translation studies, my project also aspires to benefit from and contribute to theoretical frameworks such as world literature, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and aesthetics and politics.