Burç Köstem
Burç Köstem (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University (suprevisor: Jonathan Sterne). His doctoral research investigates the mutual production of reactionary sentiment and neoliberalism across the sites of urban construction, financial speculation and social media platforms in Turkey. More broadly, he is interested in the politics of the built environment, the problem of waste and excess in urban economies, critiques of political economy and post-autonomist political thought.
Contact: burc.kostem@mail.mcgill.ca
Projects
The Reactionary Complex: Construction, Finance and Platforms in Post-2008 Turkey (doctoral dissertation; ongoing) studies the meeting of construction, financial speculation and popular mobilization over social media platforms as material sites through which to understand the co-production of reactionary sentiment and contemporary capitalism in Turkey. Specifically, the thesis studies the construction of a new canal in İstanbul that, when completed, will dredge open a second pathway between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea (Kanal İstanbul) significantly expanding the boundaries of urban space. Additionally, the thesis also investigates a nation-wide campaign to get citizens to invest in the Turkish lira, as a reaction to the uncertainty and speculatory pressure of currency markets. Entering public discourse in the aftermath of the post 2008 crisis, both Kanal İstanbul and the national currency campiagn increasingly become the focal point of political attention and affective investment in Turkey. Thus, the project considers how the construction of the canal and the national currency campaign were prefigured, contested, anticipated, and resisted through mobilizing social media platforms. Last bringing these sites into a conversation with the work of Gilles Deleuze, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Gilbert Simondon, as well as the work of Turkish intellectual historian Tanıl Bora and artist Serkan Taycan, the thesis also attempts to think through the themes of uncertainty, abundance and limits, to explore what an antireactionary and anticapitalist politics could mean today (supervisor: Jonathan Sterne).
We Are Muffled Voices: Politics of Infrastructural Disruption and the Ontology of Threat explores the cultural and intellectual anxieties around the transmission, disruption, and audibility of the Islamic call to prayer (ezan) in Turkey over the past two decades. While the ezan’s audibility has long been a prevalent concern among conservative circles in Turkey at least since the early 20th century (often crystallizing their accounts of modernity and technological change), this project examines how this historically grounded concern was more recently mobilized as a technique of reactionary sentiment both by the ruling Justice and Development Party. Studying how the concern around the ezan was mobilized through party events, television series and social media platforms between 2002-2019, I am interested in why this concern became indexed to the affective production of an existential threat. Mobilizing the Turkish concept of beka (meaning continuation, survival, but also remainder and perpetuity) the project examines how this conception of threat invites the listener not only to hear the ezan but simultaneously overhear the possibility of its imminent disruption. In short, my aim is to show why the disruption of the ezan came to slowly signify an existential threat in Turkey and how the spread of this concern manifested itself through the circulatory economies of networked media. In doing so, I hope to contribute to an emerging literature around the spread of social media platforms in authoritarian contexts.
‘The World is Sinking:’ Sand, Scarcity and Urban Infrastructure in Dubai explored the affordances of construction sand to think through the transformations of Dubai’s urban space throughout the 20th century. Putting sentiment alongside sediment the project focused on the dredging of Dubai Creek, the construction of Jebel Ali Port and the ongoing construction activity around the World Islands, as well as studying how these infrastructural projects shaped urban life through patterns of production, circulation and consumption. Additionally, the study also sought to locate Dubai’s urbanism within a much broader play of forces involving the planetary ecologies of sand and silt. To develop an understanding of this sandy urbanism, I work with the concepts of ‘antiproduction’ and ‘general economy,’ placing these concepts alongside the ‘world-making’ power of cities as articulated in theories of urban space and infrastructure. Last, situating itself within emerging discussions of sand scarcity, the project also searches for a different sort of ecological politics, one that doesn’t treat scarcity as an economic axiom, but rather investigates the making-scarce of our sandy ecologies through which capital distributes urban space.
Publications
Burç Köstem. (forthcoming). “The World is Sinking: Sand, Scarcity and Urban Infrastructure in Dubai,” Cultural Studies, Special Issue on Infrastructure. Edited by Blake Hallinan and James Nicholas Gilmore.
Activity
“Beyond Abundance: Infrastructure, Nationalism, & Flow at the Beauharnois Hydroelectric Station”,
This was a research creation project in collaboration with Jordan Kinder, Hannah Tollefson and Ayesha Vemuri, for the Energy In/Out of Place A Virtual Energy Humanities Research-Creation Workshop, June 2020. - https://energyandplace.artsrn.ualberta.ca/
“Ep. 3 The Economy...Doesn't Exist?”
Invited for a conversation on changing conceptions of “the economy” as part of the Expanding Economics Podcast, broadcast with CKUT McGill’s Campus Community Radio. Edited and hosted by Leora Schertzer. June 2020 - https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep-3-the-economy-doesnt-exist/id1510012052?i=1000480266512.
COMS 362- Economy and Ecology in Social Theory
I designed and taught a course at McGill on “Economy and Ecology in Social Theory” for the Summer 2019 and Winter 2020 terms.
After Oil School 2: Solarities
I attended the summer workshop After Oil School 2: Solarities organized by the Petrocultures Research Group at the University of Alberta. I was part of the Feminist Solarities panel organized by Sheena Wilson and Jessie Beier, May 2019.
Culture and Technology Discussion and Working Group (CATDAWG)
Since 2018 I have helped facilitate and coordinate the activities of the Culture and Technology Discussion and Working Group (CATDAWG) (PI: Jonathan Sterne).
Containment and Intimacy
I was on the organizing committee for Containment and Intimacy a conference put together by graduate students from the Art History, East Asian Studies and Communication Studies departments. Unfortunately, the conference, due to take place in April 2020, was cancelled due to travel restrictions under the coronavirus. The conference website and abstracts are available via http://containmentandintimacy.ca/.