Material Politics in Turkey: Infrastructure, Science, and Expertise (Contemporary Turkey)

This book explores the role of material entities and processes in shaping political lives in Turkey. The unifying thread of its chapters is to challenge the rendering of the material world as a mere background to or object in politics, revealing the formative role of material entities and processes in political processes of infrastructure construction, knowledge production, and technical expertise in Turkey. Chapters explore the politics of material entities such as roads, canals, oilfields, and mines as well as less elaborated material sites, including military bases, soccer fields, and wetlands. In the context of Turkey’s ongoing politics of ‘modernisation’, these interdisciplinary case studies from the fields of anthropology of infrastructure and extraction, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities, provide important new analytical and theoretical approaches to understanding Turkish politics at local, national, and transnational scales.

Duygu Kasdogan is Assistant Professor of Urbanization and Environmental Problems in Political Science and Public Administration Department at Izmir Katip Çelebi University, Turkey.

Ekin Kurtiç is Assistant Professor of Development Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Sidney Sussex College.

Mehmet Ekinci, is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, USA