Based on twenty-one months of ethnographic research in the Turkish dizi (serialized television melodrama) media world, this presentation examines how dizi makers create televisual representations of national values within the context of state censorship, as Islamic values are displacing secular ones under President Erdoğan's leadership. On and off the sets, dizi makers frequently complain about the increasing censorship in the industry over the last decade. They highlight how they can no longer produce certain scenes that appeared in dizis a decade ago, such as scenes that depict intimacy, extra-marital relationships, and alcohol consumption. I argue that RTÜK –the state agency for monitoring, regulating, and sanctioning radio and television broadcasts – despite not officially enshrined by law to sanction dizis before they air on television, serves as a major disciplining mechanism in the production process. RTUK frequently uses audience complaints as its legitimating device to interfere in broadcasts after they air and exercises differential treatment of television channels based on a channel's political stance. Focusing on interview data and ethnographic moments where dizi makers regulate content in anticipation of RTÜK censorship, I illustrate how these mechanisms of control affect dizi makers' work: they constantly vacillate between the already-punished and the yet-to-be-punished to predict what might get sanctioned by RTÜK, and this repeated uncertainty constitutes dizi makers as disciplined subjects.

The last two decades in theatre and performance studies have been marked by a utopian turn, where utopianism is almost exclusively associated with liberatory or progressive visions and goals. General Kâzım Karabekir’s theatre work with children presents an opportunity to review and revise these assumptions. When the Turkish War of Independence started in 1919, General Karabekir, who commanded the troops on the Ottoman Empire’s Eastern front, developed a militarized vocational education project to integrate orphans and other poor children into the workforce. For this project, which he called Gürbüzler Ordusu [The Army of Robust Children], Karabekir recruited six thousand children and transformed Sarıkamış into a children’s town that Ottoman intellectuals like Halide Edib explicitly described as utopian. Karabekir dressed the children like soldiers, fed them with military rations, and made them follow a strict physical exercise regimen based on military training. The Army of Robust Children was part of Karabekir's broader project of the "rehabilitation of the Kurds" and the East. Indeed, many of the children involved were Kurdish or Armenian, but they were all raised as Sunni Muslim and Turkish. Karabekir designed their educational program to eliminate any markers of ethnicity, including language and dialect. To this end, he employed applied education and drama-based pedagogy. The General was particularly fond of musical theatre, which he perceived as a tool that could “discipline the children’s spirits, bodies, and minds together.” He thus wrote and composed several musicals as well as dramatic performances in other genres, which he staged with the children. Studying the theatre as a site where ubiquitous and artistic performances converge, this project analyzes how The Army of Robust Children rehearsed and performed desirable Turkish citizenship, and negotiated the politics of belonging in and through the theatre. Theatre practices shaped these disadvantaged children's everyday performances as well as their visions for the future. Amidst the precarity of the war, their performances also gave hope to Turkish audiences, and helped Karabekir to consolidate his authority. The Army of Robust Children’s performances demonstrate how theatre and performance can motivate us to invest our energies and imaginations in utopian projects that are ambivalent or antagonistic to liberatory or progressive goals. Karabekir's project also reminds us how the tensions between utopian desires and material realities can have drastic consequences for vulnerable subjects—in this case revealed by Sarıkamış's symbolic value, enhanced by the children’s utopian performances, rendering a deadly infrastructure invisible.

This paper explores how images of public schools circulating online become a ground for contestation within Morocco’s teacher labor politics. Morocco’s public school teachers have a long and public history of tension with their employer, the Ministry of Education, which came to the fore in an episode on Facebook before the start of the school year in September 2019. A teacher’s posted video of her school in disrepair sparked a viral campaign in which teachers shared images of deteriorating schools around the country and demanded that the Ministry improve their working conditions. The Ministry responded first by refuting the veracity of the images and dismissing their circulators as proponents of “fake news”, and then finally, by creating and distributing its own images, which included carefully staged rituals in which Ministry officials toured recently renovated school facilities. The slogan “exposing the truth is not a crime” became a widely circulated hashtag among teachers as they doubled down in the face of the Ministry’s response. This paper integrates analysis of online discourse and ethnographic observation of Ministry of Education media events collected during long-term fieldwork in 2019 and early 2020. I demonstrate how Facebook in Morocco has become a site of contestation over how images represent truth (Strassler, 2020); while the Ministry focuses on arguing that individual images are “fabricated” or “false” representations of the schools they purport to document, the teachers argue via comments that—irrespective of the veracity of any one image—the stream of images exposes a broader “truth” about the Ministry’s inadequate custodianship over public education. This paper provides a new perspective on social media as a catalyst of a (fractured) public sphere in Morocco and the broader Arab World. Where scholarship has documented how states have efficiently transformed social media into tool repression and harassment in the context of authoritarian retrenchment (e.g. Errazzouki, 2020), this paper demonstrates the limits of social media for state image-making and its efforts at establishing narrative control. Works Cited Errazzouki, S. (2020). Under Watchful Eyes. Media and Politics in the Southern Mediterranean: Communicating Power in Transition after 2011. Routledge. Strassler, K. (2020). Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia. Duke University Press Books.

How has theatre become a site for the community-building efforts of the Islamic groups in Turkey and its diasporas since the Cold War? What can Islamic theatre practices in Turkey show regarding the relationship between religion, secularity, and modern theatre as an art practice perceived to be a Western form per se? With its famous genealogy centered on religious rituals, theatre is considered to have a complex relationship with religion. Yet, the popular Western-centric accounts of theatre history often designate theatre’s presence in Islamicate contexts as uneasy, if not antagonistic. In a similar vein, the scholarly practices of theatre historiography in Turkey have mainly kept the Islamic renditions of theatre out of the history and canon of “Turkish theatre.” Islamic themes and discourses have existed in the Western-influenced Turkish theatre since the 19th century. However, the second half of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of theatre groups explicitly identifying as “Islamic,” along with other terms framing their dramatic productions with ambivalent notions of piety, morality, and locality. Theatre, as an art form initially associated with Europeanization in Turkey, became a suitable venue for proselytization efforts and propagation of Islamist visions and utopias, especially during the 1960s when religious movements started to gain power in urban areas. Performing Islamist Occidentalism, some prominent Turkish Islamists envisaged theatre as, at once, the “weapon of the enemy” and an inherently apt form for “Islamic aesthetics.” Combining archival and ethnographic research, this presentation examines the aesthetics and politics of Islamic theatre in Turkey by situating it in the broader debates on theatre and performance in the Middle East.

The image of an Arab family sitting together watching their drama serial, musalsal, while enjoying sunflower seeds, bizir, and a cup of tea, shay, is the epitome of an Arab family experience. The occurrence of sitting together while watching television is an informal custom across the Arab world. It is likely that these families are watching their drama serials on one of the region’s pan-Arab satellite networks. The collective experience of watching the same television channels and shows connects Arabs and fosters a feeling of community. This exemplifies the distinctiveness of the Arab world, twenty-two nations speaking the same language, connected by culture but divided by borders. The Arabic language can be viewed as a tool that promotes a pan-Arab identity that overcomes borders and establishes a shared experience. The realm of Arab popular culture and the media through which it is delivered has created the space for a shared desire for entertainment and connectedness. It has become a vehicle for a new pan-Arabism, different from that cultivated by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s. This new pan-Arabism is invoking cultural unity without a broader political movement. Within this context, I intend to describe how popular culture has become an outlet for Arabs to express their future visions and voices within a politically complex environment despite the trauma they have endured. My primary source will be the 2020-2021 serial Dof'at Beirut (Class of Beirut). It carries a social message and integrates varying Arabic dialects; practically every character speaks a different dialect. Various dialects are indicative of Arab society coming together, representing their aspirations. Thus, borders are becoming political lines. Analyzing the representation of regional identities and how they are not a hindrance to pan-Arabism, but rather diversify the production of popular culture is essential. Incorporating a bottom-up approach as does Ziad Fahmy in Ordinary Egyptians will help identify how Arabs have formed an identity. Fahmy’s account for the masses in contrast to elites will be influential. I intend to challenge the conventional wisdom that pan-Arabism has failed and that national identities are becoming the norm. I will counter this by proposing that, culturally, pan-Arabism is alive and thriving, especially in younger generations connected by technology and actively engaging with popular culture.

In the tumultuous decade that followed the 2011 Uprising, hundreds of Syrians became interested in creating their own newspaper. By 2021, the country that once counted only a dozen regime–affiliated newspapers had produced no fewer than three hundred local periodicals. Why did Syrians go to such great lengths to print newspapers and magazines despite the existence of online news and the material difficulties of printing periodicals in wartime? This paper addresses this empirical puzzle by delving into a unique archive of 304 print magazines and newspapers published between 2011 and 2021, and by analyzing 30 semi-structured interviews with the Syrian activists who wrote and produced them. It argues that producing a newspaper over other forms of media had a particular symbolic significance under authoritarianism: newspapers, as symbolic objects, assisted in subjectivation (Warnier 2004), the process by which individuals became revolutionaries. The newspaper was the material object around which were centered revolutionary practices, such as writing, printing, distributing or hiding a newspaper. It was thus part of the numerous symbolic means of mobilization which marked the Arab Uprisings, such as the use of videos (Boëx and Devictor 2021, Wessels 2017), performance (Ismael 2011), literature and artistic practices (Cooke 2017, Wedeen 2019). From this vantage point, newspapers are turned into objects of empirical inquiry for analyzing trajectories of mobilization, step by step from the creation of the paper to its diffusion and demise. Although many studies have examined the role of social media in the Arab Uprisings, research on print media represents a significant literature gap. By shifting the focus of analysis in the study of symbolic resistance from digital and visual media toward print culture, this article makes visible the role of materiality in helping to forge social movements. The method adopted follows the trajectory of a social movement through the ‘cultural biography’ (Kopytoff 1986, see also Appadurai 1988) of the newspaper as a material object, acknowledging its agency as a non-human (Latour 2007). The newspaper’s life gives us a trail into the trajectory of the Syrian civil opposition, from the initial hopeful and non-violent protests, to the professionalization of opposition institutions in rebel-held areas through the creation of editorial teams, to the repression and scattering of opposition activists in the region and beyond. This material-biographical approach allows for understanding fundamental questions of collective action, especially motivation, social movement organization, and the sustainability of mobilization over time.