Built in the Landscape: Large Dam Construction and Expertise in Turkey This paper examines the role of the landscape in shaping the construction and maintenance of large-scale infrastructures in Turkey. Over the last two decades, megaprojects have been central to the politics of Justice and Development Party, mobilizing the claim of making a “New Turkey.” This novel emphasis on megaprojects as political tools of building hegemony (Paker, 2017) draws upon the long-lasting legacy of practices of conquering nature and transforming space. By shifting attention from the spatio-political implications of megaprojects to the equally important politics of expertise integral to the construction of these projects, I will approach large dams as political, technical, and ecological assemblages whose embeddedness in a landscape is not a given, but a highly negotiated and dynamic process. My ethnographic analysis will focus on two specific sites: (i) the construction of the dam body and (ii) the maintenance of the dam reservoir on the Çoruh River located in northeastern Turkey. First, I will analyze how experts and engineers survey, decide on, and monitor the very site where the dam body is located. Second, I will look at foresters’ efforts of protecting dams from erosion and sedimentation through practices of soil conservation in the uplands. By looking at the ways in which the relationship between large dams and the landscape they inhabit is managed, this paper will shed light on the co-existence of different forms of expertise and temporalities in the making of large-scale infrastructures. Drawing upon scholarly works that approach biophysical environment as an integral part of infrastructure building and maintenance (Carse, 2014; Barry, 2016), I will show that the juxtaposition of immediacy of construction and the long-term temporality of maintenance render visible what I call “uneasy collaborations” within a diverse expert and engineering community. Works Cited Barry, A 2016, “Infrastructure and the earth,” in P. Harvey, C. B. Jensen, and A. Morita (eds.), Infrastructures and social complexity: a companion, Routledge, London, pp.187-198. Carse, A 2014, Beyond the big ditch: politics, ecology, and infrastructure at the Panama Canal, The MIT Press, Cambridge. Paker, H 2017, “The ‘Politics of Serving’ and Neoliberal Developmentalism: The Megaprojects of the AKP as Tools of Hegemony Building,” in F. Adaman, B. Akbulut, and M. Arsel (eds.), Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents: Economic Policy and the Environment under Erdo?an, I.B. Tauris, London, New York, pp.103-119.