From the 1990s onwards, studies on women’s movement in the late Ottoman era have increased, and the cliché that the Turkish Republic, which was founded in 1923, has emancipated women unconditionally and without limits has started to be challenged. Through Nezihe Muhittin’s life story, Yaprak Zihnioğlu demonstrated that the women’s movement could not continue without the consent of the political male elites during the very first years of the Republic. Sanem Timuroğlu, on the other hand, claimed that early Republican male elites intentionally obscured the memory of the late Ottoman women’s movement, which had deep intellectual roots. She also argued that historiography in Turkey on the women’s movement appreciated the late Ottoman women’s movement’s connection to the contemporary ones in the world as late as the 1990s. Furthermore, Elif Ekin Akşit, who analyzed the education of women from the 1770s to the 1940s, asserted that while Ottoman women were taught natural sciences during the late years of the Ottoman Empire, with the foundation of the Republic, these courses were removed from their curriculum and replaced with more “domestic” courses. Under the light of this information, this paper problematizes the fact that the very first women natural scientists emerged during the relatively late years of the Republic and their number stayed limited for a long time, even though the Ottoman women’s movement was very active until the 1920s and the University for Ottoman Women was founded in the first years of the 20th century while having half of its first graduates in the field of natural sciences. In this context, this paper pursues the first graduates of the natural sciences branch at the Ottoman Women’s University and the very first women natural scientists of the Republic and shows that the Republican male elite has not genuinely supported women in the field of science.

Building Blocks: State, Citizenship, and the Transformation of Child Health in the Late Ottoman and Early Republican Turkey This paper examines the development of children’s healthcare in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican history (1850s through 1940s) at the intersection of citizenship and nation-building by paying particular attention to the increasing efforts to redefine relationships between children’s and women’s health and state by governing their bodies. Based on archival documents, as well as medical treatises, and pamphlets from the period, this research underscores the role of the trans-imperial intermediaries in the medical knowledge creation and transfer. It sheds light on the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican physicians’ efforts to eliminate inequalities in the healthcare system by expanding accessibility and specialization. The pioneering physicians such as Besim Ömer Pasha (known as Besim Ömer Akalın in the Republican period) underlined the need for the “democratization of medicine” and initiated the developments that led to specialization in children’s healthcare, which later evolved into modern pediatrics. Tracing the early phases of the development of comprehensive pediatric care, this paper focuses on various aspects of the modernization processes in medicine in the period between the 1850s to 1940s. It also addresses healthcare professionals’ entanglements with biopolitics via population control and designing desired citizens from infancy onward by way of engineering and/or correcting children’s behavior. Many traditional medical practices that are related to childbirth, children’s health, and child behavior underwent substantial changes in this transitional period. This paper also contextualizes the genesis of Ottoman/Turkish pediatrics with an eye on the developments in European and American medical models during the same period.

Sacred landscapes are natural or cultural spaces designated for religious worship, often believed to have special power or to be inhabited by spirits that serve as intermediaries between humans and the Divine. This paper explores the significance of sacred landscapes in popular beliefs, folklore, and cultural heritage in Palestine, with specific focus on the roles that such places played in traditional healing rituals and everyday healing practices. Specifically, this paper asks: what role did sacred places play in healing practices, how do these practices vary across different times, places and religious traditions. In pursuing these questions, this paper seeks to better understand how the meaning of these sites and practices have transformed due to increased alienation from both the sacred and natural worlds due to modernization and urbanization in the context of Israeli settler-colonial dispossession and military occupation. Notably, this paper highlights the continuity and blending of ancient pagan practices and monotheistic beliefs, and their legacy in Palestinian cultural heritage. Further, this paper argues that healing practices in Palestine help us to conceptualize sacred sites, not as static spaces, but dynamic socio-spatial assemblages made up of diverse human and non-human elements which vary in affective intensity at certain times and places, blend the physical and metaphysical realms and as well as the realms of culture and nature. To demonstrate this, we draw upon historical ethnographic writing from the 19th and 20th centuries as well as traditional folk knowledge passed down through oral and practical tradition into the 21st. To document this knowledge and experience, oral history interviews were conducted with elder residents of rural villages and mountainous areas of central Palestine. Through this combined approach of historical documentary research and oral history interviewing, we aim to link the past with the present, exploring popular memory in Palestine to reveal the roots of rituals and beliefs related to healing in sacred sanctuaries, as well as how such practices evolve and change over time.

Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1922-23 led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), a specific brand of Turkish nationalism and statism known as Kemalism emerged as the official foundational ideology for the new state. The intellectual and political origins of this ideology are diffuse and diverse, ranging from late Ottoman pan-Turkic nationalist movements to 19th century German materialism, and have been exhaustively studied by scholars both inside and outside of Turkey. Almost all of the major intellectual currents that informed official Turkish nationalism in the early Republic do, however, have one thing in common: they used the cutting-edge academic and scientistic techniques of their day in an attempt to define who could – and should – be called a Turk. Never was this tendency more pronounced than in the official turn towards anthropology and anthropometry during the era of High Kemalism in the 1930s. Beginning in 1930 with the articulation of the Turkish History Thesis (Türk Tarih Tezi), which claimed that all human civilization had Turkish origins, physical anthropology became an invaluable tool in the arsenal of the Turkish intellectuals who were charged with delineating and building the new nation. This movement reached its zenith in 1939 with the publication of a ground-breaking and ostensibly definitive anthropometric survey of the Turkish ethnie carried out by Afet İnan, an academic and ideologue who also happened to be an adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal. This paper argues that Afet İnan’s study, published as her doctoral dissertation at the University of Geneva under the title "l’Anatolie, le pays de la 'race' turque: recherches sur les caractères anthropologiques des populations de la Turquie," represents the culmination of the “anthropologization” and general scientization of Turkish nationalism. Furthermore, while the anthropometric study and the Turkish History Thesis that it legitimated have become mere eccentric footnotes in Turkish history, this paper will contend that they both constitute part of a long history of attempts to apply avant-garde disciplinary methods to the project of nation-building in Turkey.

This paper examines how Turkish Cold-War psychiatry helped facilitate a political realignment in which religious conservatives and secularist state leaders united against the radical left. It focuses on particular on the writings of Ayhan Songar, a prominent psychiatrist who co-founded the conservative think-tank Aydinlar Ocagi (Hearth of the Enlightened) in 1970 and served as its president from 1979 to 1984. Drawing on Songar’s scientific and popular writings on a wide range of topics, I show how Songar used technoscientific concepts drawn in particular from cybernetics to establish a link between the Turkish state’ long-standing ideals of scientific governance and religious conservatives’ spiritual frame of reference. Cybernetic concepts enabled Songar to frame his psychiatric and neurological expertise in terms of a fundamentally spiritual worldview. Building on this synthesis, Songar sought to develop a spiritually rooted psychiatry that would serve as a basis for anti-leftist policies in education and the criminal justice system after the 1980 military coup.