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Organized Doctoral Workshops by Selen Etingu

The 6th Annual MUBIT Doctoral Workshop in Late- and Post-Ottoman Studies in Basel, Digital Media,... more The 6th Annual MUBIT Doctoral Workshop in Late- and Post-Ottoman Studies in Basel, Digital Media, Islam, and Politics in the Middle East, immersed students in comparative studies of Islamist politics in the Middle East and North Africa through the lens of how violent and non-violent Islamist state and non-actors, as well as their opponents, use and manipulate digital and social media to further their goals. The workshop was specifically interested in exploring themes in how the region’s religious, political and social forces interact and mobilize in digital space, including their competing organizational networks and narrative claims.

As an increasingly more popular and politically-relevant topic in the region and beyond, we seek applicants whose work lie at the intersection of ICTs (information and communication technologies – such as Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other web channels) and social media platforms on the one hand, and religion, politics, culture, and mobilization on the other.

Related questions that the workshop explored included:

1.The definition of "Islamism," Islamic vs. Islamist vs. jihadist hierarchies, communication strategies, and organizational networks of influence in the digital world

a. How existing religious hierarchies adapt to digital media? Formal religious institutions, traditional pipeline of fatwas, how do traditional formal religious communication differs from online?

b. Digital culture of ICT-imams: How off-the-grid imams and religious figures emerge and gather followers on Twitter, Youtube etc. and create a wedge between the ummah and traditional sources of Islamic authority?

c. Networks of extremism and tolerance: which types and formations of religious hierarchies and networks preach extremism online and which others emphasize tolerance, integration and co-existence.

d. How do ICTs impact religious resource mobilization? How digital technologies impact the way in which religious groups organize, maintain ties and act in a uniform matter?

e. Islamist political parties and voter mobilization in digital space: How do various strands of Islamist movements interact with the digital space and other types of party formations?

2. Digital Surveillance, Censorship, Protest, Voice, and Opposition in the Middle East

a. Online and offline interaction in protests: What is the role of ICTs and platforms in voicing grievance, mobilizing resources and challenge hegemony?

b. Protest technology in the Middle East: How do protest technologies (drones, encryption, messaging) impact the way in which protests are organized and mobilized? Do they provide a significant advantage to opposition groups, or have the region’s states fully developed capabilities to counter them?

c. Circumvention and privacy: To what extent could the post-Snowden awareness on state censorship enable technologies that disable surveillance and government monitoring? Have they been successful in enabling freedom of expression and voice?

d. “Who Censors What?”Allowedvs.criminalizedformsofdigitalexpression:whattypesof content get censored in which Middle Eastern country? All countries officially censor content that is against moral values, but censorship is also a highly political issue whose content that varies across different countries in the region.

e. External Actors of Middle Eastern Surveillance: Although surveillance and censorship is rampant in the Middle East, most of the technology that enables the region’s states to do so come from democratic countries. What are the stakes of Western surveillance companies in the region and how do they impact surveillance politics?

3. Organized Diversion: Fake News, Trolls Bots

a. Purpose and mechanics of organized diversion: The influence of digital spoilers and distractors on the region’s politics has grown significantly in the last few years, from the Saudi-Qatari-UAE dispute to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such digital diversion methods have grown into an analytical field of their own.

b. Regime type and narratives of diversion: We have to focus on which actors have created fake news concerning these moments, the tools and techniques that have enabled the creation and dispersion of such narratives, political uses and abuses of such narratives, and motivations for their creation and international ripple effects of especially potent fake news narratives and dispersal strategies.

4. Online Radicalization and ICT Use of Extremist Groups

a. How jihadi groups recruit, track and mobilize online: social media allows extremists to recruit and propagandize across borders, in a way that 20th-century technology never allowed. This renders modern extremism deadlier, given their reach and ability to trigger coordinated, as well as lone-wolf attacks.

b. Power bargaining and networking behaviour or radical groups: Extremist groups not only compete with their declared enemies, but also with each other in recruitment and diffusion of extremism messaging. How these groups compete in digital space gives us a clear idea on how their offline interests structures and strategies are shaped?

5th Annual MUBIT Doctoral Workshop in Late- and Post-Ottoman Studies in Basel From Unionism to ... more 5th Annual MUBIT Doctoral Workshop in Late- and Post-Ottoman Studies in Basel

From Unionism to Kemalism: Social and Political Transformation of Turkey

October 27-28, 2017

A Workshop with

Prof. Dr. M. Asım Karaömerlioğlu (Boğaziçi University)
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ahmet Kuyaş (Galatasaray University)

The 5th Annual MUBIT Doctoral Workshop in Late- and Post-Ottoman Studies in Basel, From Unionism to Kemalism: Social and Political Transformation of Turkey, is a two-day intensive seminar (from October 27, 12:30 pm to October 28, 12:30 pm, 2017) organized by Prof. Dr. Maurus Reinkowski, Dr. Selen Etingü and Murat Kaya, M.A. at the Middle Eastern Studies of Department of Social Sciences at the University of Basel.

This workshop intends to shed light on specific historiographical questions emerging from the interactions of political developments, demographic realities and social mobilization in Turkey from the Unionist through the Kemalist era (1908-1945). By examining such interactions, we aim to reassess and rethink some of the dominant viewpoints and paradigms relating to the general contours of Turkish history.

The workshop will include four sessions:

1. Social Dynamics during the Unionist Era
2. Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1908-1922)
3. How the Social Affects the Political? Population and Political Mobilization in Kemalist Turkey
4. The Rise and the Waning of Kemalist Jacobinism, 1923-1939

The 3rd Annual MUBIT Doctoral Workshop in Late- and Post-Ottoman Studies in Basel, "A Modern Worl... more The 3rd Annual MUBIT Doctoral Workshop in Late- and Post-Ottoman Studies in Basel, "A Modern World in Flux: Studying Migration, Refugees, and Settlement Regimes from the Middle East and Beyond," is a two-day intensive seminar (May 29-30, 2015) organized by Prof. Dr. Maurus Reinkowski, Dr. Selen Etingü, and Alp Yenen, M.A. at the Middle Eastern Studies of Department of Social Sciences at the University of Basel.
The objective of the workshop is for participants to acquire advanced insight into the study of migration, refugees, and settlement regimes in and from the Global South in a historical-comparative and social-theoretical manner.

This two-day seminar will take an inter-disciplinary approach to discussing, theorizing and historicizing the impact of large-scale, modern human migrations as a result of war and economic development. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship in anthropology, sociology and history, this seminar will apply new methods of analyzing these movements of immigrants and refugees. The same methods will also be used to examine the actions of those governments seeking to settle such people who directly affected the global transformations of the past two centuries (1800-2015). These two days will be broken up into at least four separate sections, with a survey of the larger issues addressed within the different disciplines. In each of the sections, different sources will be used to initiate discussion among the participants.

The doctoral workshop is funded by MUBIT Inter-University Doctoral Coordination in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Basel/Zurich and is a part of the curriculum of the Graduate School of Social Sciences (G3S), University of Basel.

Doctoral Workshop with Erik J. Zürcher and M. Hakan Yavuz

Poster presentations by Selen Etingu

Drafts by Selen Etingu

The subject of Ottoman tombstones is a field that is attracting much academic interest, although ... more The subject of Ottoman tombstones is a field that is attracting much academic interest, although the value of this source for the study of Ottoman art and history still remains largely unrecognised. The thesis deals with one of the most notable features of the Ottoman tombstone, namely the headgear represented upon it. In a society in which hierarchy played a vital role, headgear was always an important communicator of status and identity both in life and after death, particularly from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

This research looks at three administrative departments of the Ottoman state: the financial, the palace, and the central administrations. The different headgear worn by higher and lower-ranking officials is analysed on tombstones and compared with that represented in other visual and written sources. The study seeks to identify the particular types of headgear worn by different occupational groups within three administrative systems and, by analysing what is carved on each of the tombstones, shows how headgear conveyed social status.

The identification of specific headgear is then placed within the context of the evolution of carved tombstones, actual headgear and official hierarchy in the Ottoman Empire up to the eighteenth century. The study analyses the introduction of different types of headgear throughout this period and clarifies mistakes and the use of incorrect terminology in previous identifications of the headgear as shown in costume albums, manuscript illustrations, and written sources. It also discusses the changes and the increasing variety of types and decorative styles of headgear within the century before the fez was introduced in 1826, as a reflection of the need among the ruling classes for increased distinction among themselves, and the identification with the status conferred by their official roles.