Yesim Kaptan - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Yesim Kaptan

Routledge eBooks, Jan 25, 2023

Routledge eBooks, May 3, 2023

Television & New Media, May 12, 2023

This article investigates the conceptualization of spatiality and temporality in television drama... more This article investigates the conceptualization of spatiality and temporality in television drama series in the age of extensive digital media consumption by focusing on Turkish audiences’ reception of Danish TV dramas. Based on the empirical data collected through extended fieldwork in Turkey, and relying on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope (spacetime), I analyze how research participants negotiate socio-geographical features, as well as both spatial and temporal textual representations signifying Danish culture and society by delineating “authenticity” and “local color” to distinct spatiotemporal cues in Danish TV drama series. This study reveals that by critically articulating notions of authenticity and local color as distinguishing markers of a particular spacetime, Turkish audiences employ these concepts as strategies to define “national chronotope” which provides a middle ground for reconciliation between the facticity of the geographical place and mediated images of space, as well as factuality of time and local temporalities on screen.

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, Sep 22, 2021

This article investigates how Turkish audiences conceptualize authenticity in their engagement wi... more This article investigates how Turkish audiences conceptualize authenticity in their engagement with foreign television (TV) productions in the case of Danish TV dramas. The theoretical notion of authenticity is juxtaposed with empirical material from fieldwork interactions, focus group interviews, and one-on-one interviews conducted with Turkish audiences between 2016 and 2018. By employing a semiotic analysis of fieldwork data, I argue that Turkish audiences attribute authenticity to the Danish TV drama series according to a socially created modality (truth value of a sign). This article draws on accounts about modality markers in TV drama series such as authentic portrayals of Danish TV characters and plausible-realistic depictions as a verisimilitudinous representation of everyday life. In the context of cross-cultural television viewing practices, the way Turkish audiences attribute meaning to Danish TV series in terms of authenticity, realism, and modality reveals a distinct differentiation between Danish TV dramas and other nationally and globally circulating media products.

SELÇUK ÜNİVERSİTESİ İLETİŞİM FAKÜLTESİ AKADEMİK DERGİSİ, Jul 14, 2016

Bu makalenin amacı genel olarak iletişim çalışmalarında özel olarak reklamcılık alanında yapılan ... more Bu makalenin amacı genel olarak iletişim çalışmalarında özel olarak reklamcılık alanında yapılan alan araştırmalarına medya etnografisi perspektifinden kuramsal bir katkıda bulunmaktır. Bu nedenle çok alanlı etnografi (multi-sited ethnograhy) konusunda yapılan araştırmalar ve temel eserlerin değerlendirilmesi ile medya etnografisi ile ilgilenenlere giriş düzeyinde kaynak olabilecek bir çalışma sağlanmıştır. Medya alanındaki etnografik çalışmalar son yirmi yılda yaygın hale gelmiştir. Ancak bu çalışmaların çoğu ya medyadaki üretim ya da alımlama konusuna eğilmekte, nadir olarak her ikisine de odaklanan araştırmalar yapılmaktadır. Makalede hem medya antropolojisinde kullanılan yöntemler tartışılmış hem de medyada üretim ve alımlama çalışmaları ile bu ikisi arasındaki ilişkiyi inceleyen çalışmalar çözümlenmiştir. Alımlama alanındaki çalışmalarda çok alanlı etnografik araştırmalara daha fazla yer verilmesinin gerekliliği tezinden hareketle çok alanlı etnografik araştırmaların medya ve iletişim çalışmaları alanına getireceği kuramsal ve kavramsal yenilikler tartışılmıştır. Makalede ayrıca iki ayrı kavram tartışılarak "yabancı öteki" (foreign other) ve Pierre Bourdieu'nün kullandığı "alan" (field) kavramlarının etnografinin bir yöntem olarak geliştirilmesi ile medya etnografisine farklı bakış açıları getirebileceği önerilmiştir. Eleştirel medya çalışmalarına ve son dönemde reklamcılık alanınında yapılan alan araştırmalarına antropolojik bir bakış açısının getireceği katkılar da yine bu çerçevede değerlendirilmiştir. Sonuç olarak makale çok alanlı etnografinin reklamcılık çalışmalarında kullanılmasının önemini vurgulayarak bu tür çalışmalara olan gerekliliğin altını çizmektedir.

International Communication Gazette

The transnationalization of the Turkish television industry, which began in the late 1990s, has b... more The transnationalization of the Turkish television industry, which began in the late 1990s, has been continuing with enormous success with Turkish TV series now being exported to more than 150 countries. In both introductions to the double special issue, we contextualize television in Turkey as a significant cultural field of production within its historical background and trace the transnational trajectory of Turkish dramas in Turkey and abroad. By focusing on the tensions and transformations spurred by the global presence of Turkish television, we critically examine what it means both for global audiences to consume and for the industry to produce Turkish dramas in the contemporary global televisual landscape. In the first volume (Issue 3) of this double special issue, the contributors reflect on the reception of Turkish TV series as well as their global and local consumption networks. In the second volume (Issue 4), the manuscripts explore the consequences of the industry practic...

The Handbook of European Communication History

International Communication Gazette

The transnationalization of the Turkish television industry, which began in the late 1990s, has b... more The transnationalization of the Turkish television industry, which began in the late 1990s, has been continuing with enormous success with Turkish TV series now being exported to more than 150 countries. In both introductions to the double special issue, we contextualize television in Turkey as a significant cultural field of production within its historical background and trace the transnational trajectory of Turkish dramas in Turkey and abroad. By focusing on the tensions and transformations spurred by the global presence of Turkish television, we critically examine what it means both for global audiences to consume and for the industry to produce Turkish dramas in the contemporary global televisual landscape. In the first volume (Issue 3) of this double special issue, the contributors reflect on the reception of Turkish TV series as well as their global and local consumption networks. In the second volume (Issue 4), the manuscripts explore the consequences of the industry practic...

International Communication Gazette

Since the 2000s, the television industry in Turkey has emerged as a transnational business and as... more Since the 2000s, the television industry in Turkey has emerged as a transnational business and as one of the largest TV program exporters worldwide. However, Turkish television is still largely national in its production practices and content, and thus, highly vulnerable to the domestic political landscape and media regulations of the government. In the last two decades, rather than endorsing the independent growth of this emerging industry in the international markets, the Turkish government has erected barriers by tightening censorship and passing new regulations to control national television and its content production. The AKP government deployed various state apparatuses, including Turkey's public broadcasting channel (TRT), English language news channel (TRT World), and the regulatory agency Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) to foster the type of television content that can ideologically serve the AKP's conservative and neo-Ottomanist agendas. Drawing on the ...

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

International Journal of Communication, 2020

The expression “the people” became an epicenter of media debates during Turkey’s June 2018 nation... more The expression “the people” became an epicenter of media debates during Turkey’s June 2018 national elections and its transition from parliamentary to presidential governance. Through qualitative and semiotic analysis of primary sources (newspaper stories, op-eds, columns, and editorials), this study investigates political rhetoric and the concept of “the people” in Turkish Islamist print media, particularly the progovernment Turkish daily Yeni Şafak . This article brings to light how a contested meaning of the concept “the people” was featured in the daily in the midst of rival, polarizing populist discourses during the 2018 national elections in Turkey. The analysis reveals that Yeni Şafak articulated views representing populism and the ethos of political Islam in the media ideology—an ambiguous and equivocal systemic worldview of media institutions grounded in a greater system of beliefs and processes naturalized as social reality. As a result, Yeni Şafak created unyielding divid...

Drawing on interviews with advertisers in three Turkish advertising agencies, this paper analyses... more Drawing on interviews with advertisers in three Turkish advertising agencies, this paper analyses the knowledge production practices of these agencies in order to understand how tacit knowledge has become the main source of differentiation for survival in the advertising sector. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of common sense and Alfred Schutz’s social theory of knowledge, I argue that the production of implicit or tacit knowledge – non-verbal, or otherwise unarticulated and intuitive forms of knowledge – is understood not merely as a business strategy and a battleground within and between agencies, but as a socially constructed form of power, working through discursive practices in advertising business. Thus, tacit knowledge, as a practical strategy, is employed for the purposes of improvisation and invention within the structured social order of the advertising field. In advertising, explicit or codified knowledge depends upon and privileges tacit knowledge in knowledge pr...

This chapter reconsiders Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of “aura” while applying his concept... more This chapter reconsiders Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of “aura” while applying his concept to the viewing experience of Turkish audiences watching Danish television drama. Based on qualitative audience research, I show the significance of the concepts of “aura” and “authenticity” for the Turkish viewers’ engagement with the Danish television series Forbrydelsen [The Killing] as an auratic object. The audiences did not see or find authenticity or aura in remakes of the drama series originating elsewhere, including the US or Turkey. The aura was considered entirely irreplaceable and impossible to reproduce in Danish series’ various international remakes, of which the Turkish remake of The Killing, Cinayet, was naturally an important point of reference. I thus show the continued significance of artistic aura and authenticity, even in the age of digital reproduction.

This paper discusses three different conceptual perspectives: cultural globalization, Samuel Hunt... more This paper discusses three different conceptual perspectives: cultural globalization, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to understand and analyze the increasing popularity of Turkish TV series in the Middle East, Balkans, and Eastern Europe. I scrutinize the potentials and pitfalls of these three approaches in order to examine the broad dissemination and successes of Turkish serials in those regions within the larger context of globalization. Consequently, this paper offers a conceptual framework that provides illumination for various significant analytical issues. Due to the circulation of media content among non-Western countries and constant flux of local and regional cultures, cultural goods such as television series do not function as the ideological apparatuses of the West on “the Rest.” The globalization is not merely a top-down Western project, but rather a process that is local in its effects, that requires consumer consen...

Television in Turkey, 2020

European Television Crime Drama and Beyond, 2018

Although mostly neglected by media and communication scholars, the failures of cross-cultural rem... more Although mostly neglected by media and communication scholars, the failures of cross-cultural remakes, particularly the genre of crime drama, provide a rich and fruitful field to illustrate the complex relationships between global media flows and (trans)national audiences. In this chapter, I argue that in addition to the rugged historical development of Turkish crime drama fiction, Cinayet lost its local drama status by not accommodating the Turkish cultural context to the remake. Drawing on audience’s response to the Turkish remake of Danish crime drama Forbrydelsen in the very popular collaborative hypertext dictionary and virtual socio-political community, Eksṃi Sozluk, I analyse factors that contributed to the remake’s failure in Turkey. Turkish audiences responded critically to the remake by demanding a delicate balance between the notion of “fidelity” and cultural specificity (Turkishness) of the remake. However, among other reasons, Cinayet failed to live up to the original TV drama because of the loss of cultural specificity and a lack of balance between fidelity and creativity.

Routledge eBooks, Jan 25, 2023

Routledge eBooks, May 3, 2023

Television & New Media, May 12, 2023

This article investigates the conceptualization of spatiality and temporality in television drama... more This article investigates the conceptualization of spatiality and temporality in television drama series in the age of extensive digital media consumption by focusing on Turkish audiences’ reception of Danish TV dramas. Based on the empirical data collected through extended fieldwork in Turkey, and relying on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope (spacetime), I analyze how research participants negotiate socio-geographical features, as well as both spatial and temporal textual representations signifying Danish culture and society by delineating “authenticity” and “local color” to distinct spatiotemporal cues in Danish TV drama series. This study reveals that by critically articulating notions of authenticity and local color as distinguishing markers of a particular spacetime, Turkish audiences employ these concepts as strategies to define “national chronotope” which provides a middle ground for reconciliation between the facticity of the geographical place and mediated images of space, as well as factuality of time and local temporalities on screen.

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, Sep 22, 2021

This article investigates how Turkish audiences conceptualize authenticity in their engagement wi... more This article investigates how Turkish audiences conceptualize authenticity in their engagement with foreign television (TV) productions in the case of Danish TV dramas. The theoretical notion of authenticity is juxtaposed with empirical material from fieldwork interactions, focus group interviews, and one-on-one interviews conducted with Turkish audiences between 2016 and 2018. By employing a semiotic analysis of fieldwork data, I argue that Turkish audiences attribute authenticity to the Danish TV drama series according to a socially created modality (truth value of a sign). This article draws on accounts about modality markers in TV drama series such as authentic portrayals of Danish TV characters and plausible-realistic depictions as a verisimilitudinous representation of everyday life. In the context of cross-cultural television viewing practices, the way Turkish audiences attribute meaning to Danish TV series in terms of authenticity, realism, and modality reveals a distinct differentiation between Danish TV dramas and other nationally and globally circulating media products.

SELÇUK ÜNİVERSİTESİ İLETİŞİM FAKÜLTESİ AKADEMİK DERGİSİ, Jul 14, 2016

Bu makalenin amacı genel olarak iletişim çalışmalarında özel olarak reklamcılık alanında yapılan ... more Bu makalenin amacı genel olarak iletişim çalışmalarında özel olarak reklamcılık alanında yapılan alan araştırmalarına medya etnografisi perspektifinden kuramsal bir katkıda bulunmaktır. Bu nedenle çok alanlı etnografi (multi-sited ethnograhy) konusunda yapılan araştırmalar ve temel eserlerin değerlendirilmesi ile medya etnografisi ile ilgilenenlere giriş düzeyinde kaynak olabilecek bir çalışma sağlanmıştır. Medya alanındaki etnografik çalışmalar son yirmi yılda yaygın hale gelmiştir. Ancak bu çalışmaların çoğu ya medyadaki üretim ya da alımlama konusuna eğilmekte, nadir olarak her ikisine de odaklanan araştırmalar yapılmaktadır. Makalede hem medya antropolojisinde kullanılan yöntemler tartışılmış hem de medyada üretim ve alımlama çalışmaları ile bu ikisi arasındaki ilişkiyi inceleyen çalışmalar çözümlenmiştir. Alımlama alanındaki çalışmalarda çok alanlı etnografik araştırmalara daha fazla yer verilmesinin gerekliliği tezinden hareketle çok alanlı etnografik araştırmaların medya ve iletişim çalışmaları alanına getireceği kuramsal ve kavramsal yenilikler tartışılmıştır. Makalede ayrıca iki ayrı kavram tartışılarak "yabancı öteki" (foreign other) ve Pierre Bourdieu'nün kullandığı "alan" (field) kavramlarının etnografinin bir yöntem olarak geliştirilmesi ile medya etnografisine farklı bakış açıları getirebileceği önerilmiştir. Eleştirel medya çalışmalarına ve son dönemde reklamcılık alanınında yapılan alan araştırmalarına antropolojik bir bakış açısının getireceği katkılar da yine bu çerçevede değerlendirilmiştir. Sonuç olarak makale çok alanlı etnografinin reklamcılık çalışmalarında kullanılmasının önemini vurgulayarak bu tür çalışmalara olan gerekliliğin altını çizmektedir.

International Communication Gazette

The transnationalization of the Turkish television industry, which began in the late 1990s, has b... more The transnationalization of the Turkish television industry, which began in the late 1990s, has been continuing with enormous success with Turkish TV series now being exported to more than 150 countries. In both introductions to the double special issue, we contextualize television in Turkey as a significant cultural field of production within its historical background and trace the transnational trajectory of Turkish dramas in Turkey and abroad. By focusing on the tensions and transformations spurred by the global presence of Turkish television, we critically examine what it means both for global audiences to consume and for the industry to produce Turkish dramas in the contemporary global televisual landscape. In the first volume (Issue 3) of this double special issue, the contributors reflect on the reception of Turkish TV series as well as their global and local consumption networks. In the second volume (Issue 4), the manuscripts explore the consequences of the industry practic...

The Handbook of European Communication History

International Communication Gazette

The transnationalization of the Turkish television industry, which began in the late 1990s, has b... more The transnationalization of the Turkish television industry, which began in the late 1990s, has been continuing with enormous success with Turkish TV series now being exported to more than 150 countries. In both introductions to the double special issue, we contextualize television in Turkey as a significant cultural field of production within its historical background and trace the transnational trajectory of Turkish dramas in Turkey and abroad. By focusing on the tensions and transformations spurred by the global presence of Turkish television, we critically examine what it means both for global audiences to consume and for the industry to produce Turkish dramas in the contemporary global televisual landscape. In the first volume (Issue 3) of this double special issue, the contributors reflect on the reception of Turkish TV series as well as their global and local consumption networks. In the second volume (Issue 4), the manuscripts explore the consequences of the industry practic...

International Communication Gazette

Since the 2000s, the television industry in Turkey has emerged as a transnational business and as... more Since the 2000s, the television industry in Turkey has emerged as a transnational business and as one of the largest TV program exporters worldwide. However, Turkish television is still largely national in its production practices and content, and thus, highly vulnerable to the domestic political landscape and media regulations of the government. In the last two decades, rather than endorsing the independent growth of this emerging industry in the international markets, the Turkish government has erected barriers by tightening censorship and passing new regulations to control national television and its content production. The AKP government deployed various state apparatuses, including Turkey's public broadcasting channel (TRT), English language news channel (TRT World), and the regulatory agency Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) to foster the type of television content that can ideologically serve the AKP's conservative and neo-Ottomanist agendas. Drawing on the ...

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

International Journal of Communication, 2020

The expression “the people” became an epicenter of media debates during Turkey’s June 2018 nation... more The expression “the people” became an epicenter of media debates during Turkey’s June 2018 national elections and its transition from parliamentary to presidential governance. Through qualitative and semiotic analysis of primary sources (newspaper stories, op-eds, columns, and editorials), this study investigates political rhetoric and the concept of “the people” in Turkish Islamist print media, particularly the progovernment Turkish daily Yeni Şafak . This article brings to light how a contested meaning of the concept “the people” was featured in the daily in the midst of rival, polarizing populist discourses during the 2018 national elections in Turkey. The analysis reveals that Yeni Şafak articulated views representing populism and the ethos of political Islam in the media ideology—an ambiguous and equivocal systemic worldview of media institutions grounded in a greater system of beliefs and processes naturalized as social reality. As a result, Yeni Şafak created unyielding divid...

Drawing on interviews with advertisers in three Turkish advertising agencies, this paper analyses... more Drawing on interviews with advertisers in three Turkish advertising agencies, this paper analyses the knowledge production practices of these agencies in order to understand how tacit knowledge has become the main source of differentiation for survival in the advertising sector. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of common sense and Alfred Schutz’s social theory of knowledge, I argue that the production of implicit or tacit knowledge – non-verbal, or otherwise unarticulated and intuitive forms of knowledge – is understood not merely as a business strategy and a battleground within and between agencies, but as a socially constructed form of power, working through discursive practices in advertising business. Thus, tacit knowledge, as a practical strategy, is employed for the purposes of improvisation and invention within the structured social order of the advertising field. In advertising, explicit or codified knowledge depends upon and privileges tacit knowledge in knowledge pr...

This chapter reconsiders Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of “aura” while applying his concept... more This chapter reconsiders Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of “aura” while applying his concept to the viewing experience of Turkish audiences watching Danish television drama. Based on qualitative audience research, I show the significance of the concepts of “aura” and “authenticity” for the Turkish viewers’ engagement with the Danish television series Forbrydelsen [The Killing] as an auratic object. The audiences did not see or find authenticity or aura in remakes of the drama series originating elsewhere, including the US or Turkey. The aura was considered entirely irreplaceable and impossible to reproduce in Danish series’ various international remakes, of which the Turkish remake of The Killing, Cinayet, was naturally an important point of reference. I thus show the continued significance of artistic aura and authenticity, even in the age of digital reproduction.

This paper discusses three different conceptual perspectives: cultural globalization, Samuel Hunt... more This paper discusses three different conceptual perspectives: cultural globalization, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to understand and analyze the increasing popularity of Turkish TV series in the Middle East, Balkans, and Eastern Europe. I scrutinize the potentials and pitfalls of these three approaches in order to examine the broad dissemination and successes of Turkish serials in those regions within the larger context of globalization. Consequently, this paper offers a conceptual framework that provides illumination for various significant analytical issues. Due to the circulation of media content among non-Western countries and constant flux of local and regional cultures, cultural goods such as television series do not function as the ideological apparatuses of the West on “the Rest.” The globalization is not merely a top-down Western project, but rather a process that is local in its effects, that requires consumer consen...

Television in Turkey, 2020

European Television Crime Drama and Beyond, 2018

Although mostly neglected by media and communication scholars, the failures of cross-cultural rem... more Although mostly neglected by media and communication scholars, the failures of cross-cultural remakes, particularly the genre of crime drama, provide a rich and fruitful field to illustrate the complex relationships between global media flows and (trans)national audiences. In this chapter, I argue that in addition to the rugged historical development of Turkish crime drama fiction, Cinayet lost its local drama status by not accommodating the Turkish cultural context to the remake. Drawing on audience’s response to the Turkish remake of Danish crime drama Forbrydelsen in the very popular collaborative hypertext dictionary and virtual socio-political community, Eksṃi Sozluk, I analyse factors that contributed to the remake’s failure in Turkey. Turkish audiences responded critically to the remake by demanding a delicate balance between the notion of “fidelity” and cultural specificity (Turkishness) of the remake. However, among other reasons, Cinayet failed to live up to the original TV drama because of the loss of cultural specificity and a lack of balance between fidelity and creativity.