Claudia Liebelt on cosmetic surgery and perceptions of beauty in Turkey
February 18, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #238 – Claudia Liebelt, professor of social and cultural anthropology at the Free University of Berlin, on “Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey” (Syracuse University Press).
Hair transplants, dental implants, botox, nose jobs, lip fillers, eye lifts… Turkey has become almost synonymous with the booming cosmetic sector among international “health tourists” in recent years.
Liebelt’s book is based on extensive research in beauty salons and cosmetic surgery centres across Istanbul, speaking to customers, workers and surgeons to explain the sector’s extraordinary growth among locals and foreigners.
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Omar Kadkoy on the future of Syrian migrants in Turkey
January 21, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #236 – Omar Kadkoy, foreign policy, security and migration program coordinator at Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s Istanbul office, on the future of Turkey’s Syrian migrant population after the fall of Assad.
Developments in Syria have raised expectations that the millions of Syrians in Turkey will now return home. While some have already returned, the issue is very complex and poses major social, political and economic dilemmas for both Ankara and Damascus.
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Support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Samuel Hirst on a century of Ankara-Moscow cooperation
December 17, 2024
Turkey Book Talk #234 – Samuel J. Hirst, historian and assistant professor of international relations at Bilkent University, on “Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939” (Oxford University Press).
The book examines crucial but sometimes overlooked decades of close cooperation between the young Republic of Turkey and the Soviet Union on key political, industrial and cultural projects. The conversation also discusses later episodes of collaboration between Ankara and Moscow in the 1960s and 70s, as well as the bromance between Erdogan and Putin today.
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Support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Bilge Yesil on Turkey’s global media operations
June 4, 2024
Turkey Book Talk #220 – Bilge Yesil, associate professor of media culture at City University of New York, on “Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order” (University of Illinois Press).
The book examines how the Erdogan regime has mobilised English-language media apparatuses to counter foreign criticism and project Turkey as a rising power opposed to Western imperialism, supposedly giving a voice to oppressed Muslims around the world.
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Bahar Baser on Turkey’s brain drain
March 12, 2024
Turkey Book Talk #214 – Bahar Baser, associate professor of Middle Eastern politics at Durham University, on “An Exodus from Turkey: Tales of Migration and Exile” (Edinburgh University Press), which she co-edited with Erdi Ozturk.
The book examines the current wave of migration from Turkey, focusing on the experiences of 21 public figures who have moved overseas – voluntarily or otherwise – amid political and economic turbulence in recent years.
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Turkey Book Talk #208 – Berk Esen, associate professor of political science and international relations at Istanbul’s Sabanci University, on the troubled future of Turkey’s democracy and the challenges facing its opposition parties heading into 2024.
Berk is a prolific commentator and sophisticated scholar of Turkish politics, recently co-authoring “Turkey’s New Regime: Competitive Authoritarianism” (Iletisim) along with Hakan Yavuzyilmaz and Sebnem Gumuscu.
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Turkey Book Talk #197 – Constanze Letsch on “Territorial Stigmatisation: Urban Renewal and Displacement in a Central Istanbul Neighbourhood” (Transcript).
The book examines a controversial project to demolish and rebuild Istanbul’s historic, troubled Tarlabaşı neighbourhood, the impact it had on locals and what that tells us about today’s Turkey.
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Download the ebook for free via the Transcript website.
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Elise Massicard on muhtars, the state and society in Turkey
October 25, 2022
Turkey Book Talk #179 – Elise Massicard, senior researcher at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, on “Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey” (Stanford University Press).
The book takes a deep dive into the world of the muhtar, the lowest rung of the administrative ladder in Turkey, looking first-hand at how they operate and chart a course between local residents and higher authorities in the country.
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Saniye Dedeoğlu on Syrian migrants, work and precarity in Turkey
August 16, 2022
Turkey Book Talk episode 174 – Saniye Dedeoglu of Mugla University on “Syrian Refugees and Agriculture in Turkey Work, Precarity, Survival” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury).
The book looks at Syrians’ integration into Turkey’s labour market, its effect on relations between men and women, and the role of child labour in the agriculture sector.
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Check out the episode mentioned with Murat Erdogan from February 2021.
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Turkey Book Talk episode 167 – Sarah-Neel Smith, assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art, on “Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey” (University of California Press).
The book paints a vivid portrait of Turkey’s art world in the 1950s and how it reflected early Cold War ideas of national development, individual enterprise and global integration.
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Turkey Book Talk episode #120 – Berk Esen, assistant professor of international relations at Ankara’s Bilkent University, on his paper “Why did Turkish democracy collapse? A political economy account of the AKP’s authoritarianism”, co-authored with Şebnem Gümüşçü for the journal Party Politics.
Esen also recently published “Praetorian Army in Action: A Critical Assessment of Civil–Military Relations in Turkey” in the journal Armed Forces and Society.
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Become a member to support Turkey Book Talk and get loads of extras: A 35% discount on any of over 100 books in IB Tauris/Bloomsbury’s excellent Turkey/Ottoman history category, English and Turkish transcripts of every interview upon publication, transcripts of the entire archive of episodes, and an archive of 231 reviews written by myself covering Turkish and international fiction, history, journalism and politics.
Zeynep Şentek on industry and politics in Dilovası, an environmental ‘disaster zone’
November 5, 2019
Turkey Book Talk episode #102 – Zeynep Şentek on the environment, public health and politics in Dilovası, a heavily polluted industrial district outside Istanbul.
Şentek is managing editor at BlackSea.EU, an investigative journalism platform that is part of the European Investigative Collaborations network. She is also one of the reporters of a recent investigation examining the grim health consequences of life in what a 2007 parliamentary commission called a “public health disaster zone”.
The article paints an almost hellish picture of life for the nearly 50,000 people in Dilovası, where dangerous chemicals are continuously belched into the air, cancer rates are reportedly well above average, and locals suffer from a range of severe respiratory conditions.
Here’s the report, “Toxic Valley”
Here’s a shorter report on an asbestos dump discovered in Dilovası
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Petruț Călinescu, theblacksea.eu
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