Methodology Matters

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.