COMM Talks: Josh Carney

Josh Carney will be the guest of the COMM Talks series organized by KHAS Faculty of Communication on Wednesday, December 20. You are cordially invited to Carney’s talk titled “Extreme Dizi-ness: Stretching the Bounds of Genre in (New?) Turkish Television.”

Please register: http://bit.ly/41eitx7

Abstract: This paper examines the Turkish TV serial (dizi) as a field of hegemonic struggle in light of two broadly divergent trends that appear to have emerged in recent years. The first, which I conceptualize as a strategic assault, is exemplified by the convergence of message between Directorate of Communication videos for a variety of campaigns and government-aligned ‘historical’ serials. While notions of the active viewer attest to the interpretive play between the encoding and decoding of media texts, the use of overt propaganda seems to introduce a third term to this relation in a particularly clear attempt to interpellate the would-be citizenry of ‘New Turkey’ through a sort of full-spectrum dominance of the airwaves—a phenomenon linked to what I have elsewhere called prescriptive activation. The second trend, which I conceptualize as a tactical retreat, is demonstrated in the flourishing of new approaches to the dizi in video on demand, particularly projects developed by Netflix, PuhuTV, and BluTV. These pose a variety of alternatives to the path of ‘New Turkey’ through a host of strategies, but the one explored in depth here is the rise of meta-television.

About the Speaker: Josh Carney is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. His work focuses on media from Turkey, with recent projects on popular television, cinematic censorship, and the relationship between media screens and publics. He is currently a visiting academic at Bilgi University, where he is working on an NEH Fellowship to complete a book on the politicization of historical TV drama in Turkey and beyond.