Join us for a special lecture entitled "The Feedback Loops of Creation: Ayhan Songar’s Cybernetic-Islamic Psychiatry and the 1980 Coup d’État in Turkey."
Conservative intellectuals and scientists played a key role in facilitating the alignment of Turkish right-wing political forces across the secular-religious divide during the two decades leading up to the 1980 military coup. In this talk, I explore how one particularly prominent yet understudied conservative intellectual, the psychiatrist Ayhan Songar (1926-1997), integrated the technoscientific paradigm of cybernetics into his work in order to reconcile modern neuroscience and biophysics with a religious outlook and to promote the state’s authoritarian crackdown on leftist activism after the coup.
Joakim Parslow is an assistant professor of Middle East Studies in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His work centers on the nexus of state power and intellectuals in Turkey, with an emphasis on legal and technoscientific thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.