Zeynel Gül | University of Illinois at Chicago (original) (raw)

Papers by Zeynel Gül

Science Technology and Human Values, 2025

The following editorial is a collaborative endeavor undertaken by Early Career Researchers (ECRs)... more The following editorial is a collaborative endeavor undertaken by Early Career Researchers (ECRs) located in different nations and academic institutions spanning Australia, India, Singapore, and the USA. We were four of the twenty-six participants who met in Singapore in June 2024 for the four-day "STS School" sponsored by Science, Technology, & Human Values. 1 The organizers invited us to compose the School's closing plenary, where we spoke on new concepts encountered, perspectives challenged and affirmed, and inspiration for developing future STS projects. Drawing together our plenary reflections in conversation with the editors of ST&HV, we want to collectively reflect on the following question: How can we practice STS now, to foster the more just worlds that we want inside and outside the academy? We seek to address this question because STS has long been invested in studying interlinked ontological and epistemic practices (e.g., Barad 2007; Knorr Cetina 1999) and their role in knowledge production (e.g., Haraway 1991; Harding 1986; Visvanathan 2007).
Drawing upon these legacies, we shift from focusing on practices in and
through technoscientific phenomena, to using “practices” as a lens to
analyze and advocate for STS as a form of critique.

Dec 2, 2024

In Turkey’s occupational health system, doctors must use the International Labor Organization’s (... more In Turkey’s occupational health system, doctors must use
the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) standards to
classify the chest radiographs of workers at risk of lung dis-
eases caused by dust exposure. Yet these standards do not
provide a uniformity of care within the tripartite structure
of the occupational health system, which divides disease
surveillance, disease diagnosis, and worker compensation
into distinct silos. This division often produces ambigu-
ity and unpredictable outcomes for occupational disease
claims. The traffic of diagnostic decisions among work-
places and medico-legal institutions—what I refer to as
diagnostic ecologies—shapes medical knowledge. The tri-
partite organization of the occupational health system in
Turkey makes the evaluation of chest radiographs a space
where professional expertise and professional ethics are
constantly negotiated. A focus on diagnostic ecologies
illustrates how disease ontology is distributed across the
occupational health system’s components

American Ethnologist, 2023

Every weekday morning at approximately 8 a.m., a queue of hospital visitors forms in front of the... more Every weekday morning at approximately 8 a.m., a queue of hospital visitors forms in front of the registration desk at the Occupational Diseases Unit of Lokman Hekim Hospital located in the city of Y in Turkey. The visitors typically require three types of documents: employment eligibility reports, occupational disease certificates, and periodic examination reports. Inspired by anthropological studies that examine the role of documents in the establishment of bureaucratic facts, I discuss in this reflection how barcode labels distribute the laboring body as a medical object among hospital actors. The patient-workers visiting the Lokman Hekim come from various industries-ceramic manufacturing, automobile factories, shipyards-as well as the expanding gig economies of supermarkets and warehouses. At the hospital, these worker-patients undergo a comprehensive evaluation process, which I call a diagnostic circle. As they make their way through this process, doctors, nurses, laboratory technicians, and administrative staff register clinical evaluations, diagnostic categories, laboratory findings, and consultation notes into the patients' medical records. These records are then forwarded to insurance boards and labor courts (if workers decide to initiate an occupational disease claim) to determine the eligibility of worker claims for care and compensation. Additionally, these records are utilized to generate statistical data for the contentious annual reports of the Turkish Social Security Institution on occupational diseases.

Mesleki Sağlık ve Güvenlik Dergisi, 2024

Bu yazı doğanın tahakkümü aracılığıyla bize ikinci bir doğa vadeden bu zehirli yaşam rejimlerin g... more Bu yazı doğanın tahakkümü aracılığıyla bize ikinci bir doğa vadeden bu zehirli yaşam rejimlerin getirdiği risklerin ve onların devlet, yasa ve tıp eli ile düzenlenmesinin emek ve ekoloji alanında etkilerine odaklanmaktadır. Yazının ilk kısmı çevresel ve mesleki hastalıklar üzerinden yavaş şiddet kavramını ele alacak; bu kavramın bilimsel ve hukuki ‘illiyet/nedensellik’ kavramları ile ilişkisini tartışacaktır. İkinci kısımda ise yavaş şiddetin başka bir türüne göz atacak ve Türkiye’de sözüm ona meslek hastalarının sancısını dindirmek üzere ortaya atılan bürokratik, tıbbi ve yasal kurumların aslında işçiler için bir zulme dönüştüğünü somut olgular üzerinden göstereceğim. Yavaş şiddetin bu iki veçhesi – belirsizleştirilmiş nedensellik ve hastalık tanısında hantal bürokratik işleyiş – var olan şiddet kavramsallaştırmaların sınırlarına işaret etmektedir. Ancak bu sadece basit bir kavramsallaştırma sorunu değil. Yavaş şiddet tartışması sanayi bölgeleri etrafında zehirli atıklara maruz kalan yoksul yerleşim yerleri sakinleri yahut işlerinden ötürü sürekli hastalanan emekçiler örneklerinde olduğu gibi başka koşullarda epidemik gibi gözükebilecek sağlık sorunlarının bazı toplumsal kesimler için endemik hale geldiğinin altını çizmek, bu mağduriyetleri görünür kılmak ile de ilgilidir.

March 25, 2022

Among those deeply impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic were people suffering from chronic illnesses... more Among those deeply impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic were people suffering from chronic illnesses, like silicosis, a respiratory disease. In this essay, Başak Can, Zeynel Gül and Arda Yalçın examine how workers in Turkey suffering from silicosis navigate the hurdles created by the pandemic, including being unable to access routine medical care and job precarity. However, the authors found these workers used self-care practices and mobilized their networks to survive the pandemic the best they could.

Call for Papers - 2019 JHU Graduate Student Conference - Solidarities, 2019

Dear friends and colleagues, We are sharing the call for papers for this year's conference, host... more Dear friends and colleagues,
We are sharing the call for papers for this year's conference, hosted by the graduate students of the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. "Solidarities" will be held on September 20-21, 2019 at JHU's Homewood campus in Baltimore, Maryland.
Please apply with an individual or panel abstract by July 26, 2019.
We would also appreciate it if you would circulate the call for papers across your networks!
Thank you in advance for your help and consideration.
Warmly,
Organizing Committee JHU Graduate Student Conference
https://jhuanthrogradconference.wordpress.com/

Drafts by Zeynel Gül

Living biomedical uncertainties: Patients’ networks of care and obligation beyond expert knowledg... more Living biomedical uncertainties: Patients’ networks of care and obligation beyond expert knowledge

Anthropological studies of biomedical uncertainties (chronic illnesses, occupational and environmental diseases, infectious diseases, and so on) examined people’s fluid and unstable encounters with illnesses, diagnoses, medical institutions along with their familial and societal networks of care and obligation. These studies showed the limits of expert knowledge, questioned biomedicine’s promises in diagnosis, cure and prevention when a host of unknowns and indeterminacies pervade into the ecology of diseases. They further documented how the very (biomedical) expert knowledge and practices themselves might be implicated in intensification or modification of uncertainties in people’s everyday lives. For example, expert knowledge might contribute to the making of “at-risk subjectivities” (Gammeltoft 2013, Jain 2013); the suffering of minorities can be denied with the claims of “uncertain” evidence (Rouse 2009), or scientific practice confound the impact and cause of environmental exposures or diseases (Lock 2014, Petryna 2013). However, critical analyses of authoritative expert knowledges and their multifaceted impacts rarely exhaust the realm of what is thinkable and actionable for ordinary people in the face of biomedical uncertainties. We ask: how do people’s responses to biomedical uncertainties transform and are influenced by gendered, kin and cultural networks of care, obligation, and reciprocity? For this panel, we invite papers that explore how people with various illnesses and disabilities deal with biomedical uncertainties within the broader context of their everyday lives and struggle to make their lives viable. Questions we invite for further exploration include:

• How do communities and individuals respond to biomedical uncertainties in expert discourses? How do uncertainties -some of which are strategically manufactured as in the cases of environmental diseases- impact and get informed by the existing social fault-lines across race, class, and gender?

• What kind of practices of self-care (bodily or otherwise), and care for others are mobilized to counter the impacts of uncertainties? What are the local moral worlds arising from living and being with others when facing several indeterminacies?

• How do uncertainties give expression to the texture of care within the households of those with chronic conditions? How do social, moral, and cultural networks mark the everyday tactics of individuals suffering from chronic diseases?

• How can we think of the ways financial capabilities of households are impacted by the health-related uncertainties? How do regimes of work and health intersect or contradict each other in responding to conditions where one’s ability to work is ambivalent due the health-related hazards at workplaces?

• How do bureaucratic and institutional uncertainties define practices, politics, and ethics of waiting for treatment, documentation, prescription? How do bureaucracies contribute to the production and management of uncertainties around chronic diseases and disabilities?

We invite interested panelists to submit a paper title, abstract (250 words max), current affiliation and contact info to Zeynel Gul (John Hopkins University) zgul2@jhu.edu or Basak Can (Koc University) basakcan@ku.edu.tr by April 2, 2022. Decisions about acceptance of abstracts will be emailed by April 4, 2022. Please note that the panel will convene virtually.

Conference Presentations by Zeynel Gül

We would like to invite you to submit a paper for a virtual panel at the AAA Annual Meeting, Nove... more We would like to invite you to submit a paper for a virtual panel at the AAA Annual Meeting, November 9-12, Seattle, WA.

Panel Title:
Living biomedical uncertainties: Patients’ networks of care and obligation beyond expert knowledge

Organizers:
Zeynel Gul, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

Başak Can, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Koc University

Panel Abstract:
Anthropological studies of biomedical uncertainties (chronic illnesses, occupational and environmental diseases, infectious diseases, and so on) examined people’s fluid and unstable encounters with illnesses, diagnoses, medical institutions along with their familial and societal networks of care and obligation. These studies showed the limits of expert knowledge, questioned biomedicine’s promises in diagnosis, cure, and prevention when a host of unknowns and indeterminacies pervade into the ecology of diseases. They further documented how the very (biomedical) expert knowledge and practices themselves might be implicated in intensification or modification of uncertainties in people’s everyday lives. For example, expert knowledge might contribute to the making of “at-risk subjectivities” (Gammeltoft 2013, Jain 2013); the suffering of minorities can be denied with the claims of “uncertain” evidence (Rouse 2009), or scientific practice confound the impact and cause of environmental exposures or diseases (Lock 2014, Petryna 2013). However, critical analyses of authoritative expert knowledge and their multifaceted impacts rarely exhaust the realm of what is thinkable and actionable for ordinary people in the face of biomedical uncertainties. We ask: how do people’s responses to biomedical uncertainties transform and are influenced by gendered, kin and cultural networks of care, obligation, and reciprocity? For this panel, we invite papers that explore how people with various illnesses and disabilities deal with biomedical uncertainties within the broader context of their everyday lives and struggle to make their lives viable. Questions we invite for further exploration include:

· How do communities and individuals respond to biomedical uncertainties in expert discourses? How do uncertainties -some of which are strategically manufactured as in the cases of environmental diseases- impact and get informed by the existing social fault-lines across race, class, and gender?

· What kind of practices of self-care (bodily or otherwise), and care for others are mobilized to counter the impacts of uncertainties? What are the local moral worlds arising from living and being with others when facing several indeterminacies?

· How do uncertainties give expression to the texture of care within the households of those with chronic conditions? How do social, moral, and cultural networks mark the everyday tactics of individuals suffering from chronic diseases?

· How can we think of the ways financial capabilities of households are impacted by the health-related uncertainties? How do regimes of work and health intersect or contradict each other in responding to conditions where one’s ability to work is ambivalent due to the health-related hazards at workplaces?

· How do bureaucratic and institutional uncertainties define practices, politics, and ethics of waiting for treatment, documentation, prescription? How do bureaucracies contribute to the production and management of uncertainties around chronic diseases and disabilities?

Call for Abstracts:
We invite interested panelists to submit a paper title, abstract (250 words max), current affiliation and contact info to Zeynel Gul (John Hopkins University) zgul2@jhu.edu or Basak Can (Koc University) basakcan@ku.edu.tr by April 2, 2022. Decisions about acceptance of abstracts will be emailed by April 4, 2022. Please note that the panel will convene virtually.

2022 AAA Annual Meeting information:
https://annualmeeting.americananthro.org/

Thank you and best regards,

Basak & Zeynel