Organising Committee:
Melike Argıt – completed her doctoral dissertation, “Turkish Islamist Intellectuals’ Discourses with regards to the Regime of Truth” in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University in 2023. Since 2013, she has been a research assistant at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University. Her research focuses on the transformation of intellectual authority and knowledge production, Islamic political thought and political philosophy. She has been a member board of Mülkiyeliler Birliği.
Ecehan Balta – is a sociologist and holds a PhD in political science. She is a trade union activist with particular interest in ecofeminism, agriculture and peasant movements. She is a partner of Yerkure Local Studies Cooperation.
Coşku Çelik – is an Assistant Professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. Her research lies at the intersection of labour studies, development studies, and feminist political economy. She has worked extensively on natural resource extraction, rural development, the political economy of work, and social reproduction in Turkey. Her current research investigates the structural links between authoritarian neoliberal rural development, food insecurity, and women’s work in the Global South. She serves on the international advisory board of the Journal of Agrarian Change and is the author of Extractivism Across Production and Social Reproduction: Classes of Labour in Rural Turkey (Brill, 2025).
Ezgi Doğru – holds a PhD degree in Political Science from York University, Canada. Her research interests lie in the area of political economy, state theories and urban politics. She is currently a faculty member in the Sociology Department at Anadolu University.
Saygun Gökarıksel – is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. His writing focuses on authoritarianism, law, memory, communism, and revolutionary politics, especially from the viewpoint of the European East and the South. His writings have appeared in journals and blogs including South Atlantic Quarterly, Dialectical Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, LeftEast, and Jadaliyya.
Ali Yalçın Göymen – holds a PhD degree in Political Science from Istanbul University. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Praksis Journal. From 2023 to 2025, he has been a research associate and a Fellow of Einstein Foundation Academic Freedom Programme at the Centre for Social Critique, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is a research fellow at Potsdam University as a member of International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC). His research focuses on Marxist theory of alienation, politics of the commons, current authoritarian tide and theories of revolution in the 21st century.
Evren Hoşgör – completed her doctoral dissertation, “AKP, State, and Capital: A Class Analysis of the Conflict Between the Center and Periphery in Turkey” in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom in 2019. After earning her Ph.D., she returned to Turkey and began her academic career at Istanbul Bilgi University. In 2017, she was appointed Associate Professor of Management and Organization, and she currently serves as a faculty member at the School of Business at the same institution. Her scholarly work encompasses a wide range of themes, including state–capital relations, the sociology of work, political economy, business history, and the ecological crisis. Hoşgör has contributed extensively to the international academic literature through numerous journal articles and book chapters. Adopting a critical approach to contemporary debates on the ecological crisis and the so-called “green economy,” her research analyzes the ecological contradictions of capitalism through the lens of political economy. Currently, she is engaged in several major research and publication projects, including Capitalism and Democracy: Anatomy of a Contradiction (Metis Publications, 2023), The Turkish Economy: Policies, Historical Development, and Structural Transformation (forthcoming, 2025, Tarih Vakfi Yurt Publications); and The Republic at the End of Its First Century (Istanbul Bilgi University Publications, 2024).
Kaan Kangal – does research on Marx-Engels studies, the history of MEGA1 and MEGA2, Young Hegelianism, classical German philosophy, and German Marxism in the 19th and 20th centuries. His work on Marx’s Bonn Notebooks won the 2019 David Riazanov Prize. His most recent book is Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He is currently working on late Marx’s notebooks on agriculture, ecology, natural sciences and communal property.
Haluk Levent – is Professor of Economics at the Department of Management, Istanbul Bilgi University. He holds MSc. degrees from Istanbul Technical University, and Ph.D. Degree from Istanbul University. He has been visiting scholar at the Tinbergen Institute Amsterdam, Sydney University and World Bank. He is the author of a number of book chapters and various research papers published in domestic and international academic journals such as the European Journal of International Management, Middle East Development Journal, International Review of Applied Economics, The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, and others. He has also been among the authors of several reports on the labour markets, income distribution and poverty in Turkey.
Özgür Narin – is a member of Social Research Foundation, SAV, Turkey. He is an Associate Professor of Economics at Ordu University. He studies on the capitalist production of science and technology, particularly innovation and the changing scientific labour process. His current research is on Artificial Intelligence, “General Intellect” and the alternative reorganization of social production and society. He is also a member of IstanbuLab, an independent platform engaged in critical and constructive studies of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) in Turkey.
Cihan Özpınar – is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Galatasaray University, Istanbul, where he teaches political and social theory. He is currently working on a book project on the Muslim Question in Europe. His research interests include generational reproduction of migrant labour in France and French political economy.
Deniz Parlak – holds a PhD in Political Science from Ankara University, and is doing a second PhD in Political Anthropology at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder. Her research interests lie in secularism, religion-culture relations, the political economy of Islam, and gender. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Praksis Journal.
Panagiotis Sotiris – is an assistant professor of social and political philosophy at the Department of Sociology of the University of the Aegean in Mytilene. He is an editorial board member of Historical Materialism journal and of the Historical Materialism Book Series.
Aylin Topal – is a Professor in Department Political Science and Public Administration at Middle East Technical University. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Critical Sociology and Praksis Journals. Her research interests lie in political economy of (rural) development, agrarian change, food politics and and state-capital-labour relations under neoliberalism. She is currently the General Secretary of Turkish Social Sciences Assosiation.
Galip Yalman – is a graduate of the Middle East Technical University, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, is an Associate Professor (emeritus) of Political Science in the same department, at the Middle East Technical University. He received his MSc. in International Relations from the University of Southampton and his PhD. in Development Studies from the University of Manchester, UK. His research interests extend from state theory to international and comparative political economy. He is the author of Transition to Neoliberalism: The Case of Turkey in the 1980s, İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2009; co-editor of Economic Transitions to Neoliberalism in Middle Income Countries, Routledge, 2010, and Political Economy of Financial Transformation in Turkey, Routledge, 2019. He was the local coordinator of a Seventh Framework Programme of EU, called FESSUD (Financialisation, economy, society and sustainable development) on behalf of METU. He is currently the President of Turkish Social Sciences Association.
Cemil Yıldızcan – Cemil Yıldızcan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Galatasaray University. His current research engages with critical human geography and agri-food studies, focusing on diverse economies, grassroots initiatives, and the politics of food and care across urban and rural contexts.
Previous Contributors:
Elçin Aktoprak
Berkay Ayhan
Metin Bayrak
Ali Rıza Güngen
Özgür Orhangazi
Fuat Özdinç
Paul Reynolds
Onur Yıldız
Contact:
The organizational committee of Historical Materialism Istanbul 2024 can be reached at: hmistanbul.conference@gmail.com.
Historical Materialism Istanbul 2026 