This article traces the struggle of the people of Vranje to unseat their governor, Hüseyin Pasha, in the 1840s. It situates this struggle within the context of the Tanzimat reforms, one primary objective of which was to use financial and legal means to bring powerful local governors under the control of the central government. The case of Vranje, this article shows, provides a particularly colorful example to observe the disrupting effects of the center’s intervention in the provinces, to investigate the various dynamics and difficulties the center confronted in its attempt to control the periphery, and to understand the ways in which the new political discourse of the Tanzimat shaped local resistance. This article also traces the stages of political mobilization and dissent through the various strategies the people of Vranje employed, from petitioning to armed resistance, in order to fight perceived injustices.

How does the technological infrastructure of a communications medium influence the culture of an online community? Taking up a socio-technical (STS) approach to online communities and computer mediated communication, this study introduces and explores the communication culture of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) active in Turkey between 1995 and 1996. In the first part of the study, the researcher provides a brief history of BBS networks worldwide and of pre-Internet communication networks in Turkey. In the second part, using a sample from a privately owned archive of correspondences from Hitnet, a national-scale FidoNet-style BBS network popular in Turkey between 1992 and 1996, the study documents how some of the technical constraints on the level of hardware, software, and human-computer interaction (HCI) influenced the communication culture of the Hitnet community. At the same time, the study pays especial attention to the workarounds devised by community members to work around these constraints.

Currently, a mass media campaign is underway in Turkey using a new communication means called the “public spot” (kamu spotu). This article concentrates on the public spots produced by Turkey’s Ministry of Health, and more specifically on those that advocate quitting smoking and preventing obesity. Drawing on interviews with Ministry of Health personnel and analyzing the content of these spots, we suggest that they operate as risk caveats. They caution individuals against smoking and obesity’s potential harms and guide her/him towards self-health governance by encouraging the maintenance of a particular lifestyle that embraces a balanced diet, regular activity, and no smoking. As such, we read these spots as a technique of neoliberal governmentality. This technique works primarily by responsibilizing individuals as health entrepreneurs investing in risk free lifestyles; that is, by conceptualizing health as a matter of self-conduct where personal responsibilities are emphasized.

The Free Republican Party (FRP; Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası), founded and dissolved in 1930, represented the second attempt to transition to a multi-party system in Turkey, following the formation of the Progressive Republican Party (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası) in 1924. In contrast to the oppositional establishment of the latter, the FRP seemed to be a state-originated project whose establishment was decided upon by the elites of the day, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Its representation in contemporary cartoons is deemed important today given the political cartoon’s ability to simplify complex political messages into understandable symbols and metaphors and to address or reach those who may not be literate. Taking into account the social structure of society during this period, this aspect of the reach of cartoons becomes particularly important. Political cartoons’ ability to both support the text in a newspaper and penetrate historical memory through stereotypes is also significant in terms of the representation of personalities and events. This article will attempt to analyze the formation of the FRP and the depiction of its elites through newspaper cartoons. Three prominent and pro-Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi) newspapers of this period—namely Cumhuriyet, Milliyet, and Vakit—will provide the material for the content and thematic analysis of the study.

This article offers a critical reading, from the perspective of gender studies, of films produced in the politically charged environment of the 1990s and 2000s by directors Tomris Giritlioğlu and Yeşim Ustaoğlu. Giritlioğlu’s Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds (Salkım Hanımın Taneleri, 1999) and Autumn Pain (Güz Sancısı, 2008) were based on Yılmaz Karakoyunlu’s novels Salkım Hanım’ın Taneleri (1990) and Güz Sancısı (1992), while Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds (Bulutları Beklerken, 2004) was inspired by Yorgo Andreadis’ biography, Tamama (1993). The films claim artistic license in presenting individual stories, yet they embellish their representation through documentary footage about silenced historical traumas, depicting female subjects as the store of traumatic national memories, such as the exodus of Pontic Greeks in 1916, the anti-minority Wealth Tax of 1942, and the anti-Greek pogroms of 1955. Underscoring Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “feminine” as a crucial aspect of these films, this article traces two strategies used by the directors: (1) recording personal stories in order to complicate nationalist narratives and their appeal to essentialized identities, and (2) gendering trauma as female suffering inflicted by patriarchal authority. The article concludes that, regardless of their public positions to the contrary, the directors engage in feminist politics by questioning the relationship between women and the nation, by broaching issues of social justice, and by highlighting the hybridity of identities and plurality of cultures.