Material Politics in 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.

Review: This volume's excellence is partly because of the way it draws Turkey's complex past into the present, providing an exemplary analysis of the way history becomes encoded in infrastructure. * Kim Fortun, Professor, University of California Irvine, USA *
The arrival of this edited volume focusing on material politics right after the centennial of the Republic of Turkey is remarkable. With a solid contribution to the infrastructural turn in social sciences and humanities, this book promises to be a key reference for students of Turkey's turbulent relationship with the materialities of development and modernization. * Ethemcan Turhan, Assistant Professor, University of Groningen, Netherlands *