How does the technological infrastructure of a communications medium influence the culture of an online community? Taking up a socio-technical (STS) approach to online communities and computer mediated communication, this study introduces and explores the communication culture of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) active in Turkey between 1995 and 1996. In the first part of the study, the researcher provides a brief history of BBS networks worldwide and of pre-Internet communication networks in Turkey. In the second part, using a sample from a privately owned archive of correspondences from Hitnet, a national-scale FidoNet-style BBS network popular in Turkey between 1992 and 1996, the study documents how some of the technical constraints on the level of hardware, software, and human-computer interaction (HCI) influenced the communication culture of the Hitnet community. At the same time, the study pays especial attention to the workarounds devised by community members to work around these constraints.

This article traces the struggle of the people of Vranje to unseat their governor, Hüseyin Pasha, in the 1840s. It situates this struggle within the context of the Tanzimat reforms, one primary objective of which was to use financial and legal means to bring powerful local governors under the control of the central government. The case of Vranje, this article shows, provides a particularly colorful example to observe the disrupting effects of the center’s intervention in the provinces, to investigate the various dynamics and difficulties the center confronted in its attempt to control the periphery, and to understand the ways in which the new political discourse of the Tanzimat shaped local resistance. This article also traces the stages of political mobilization and dissent through the various strategies the people of Vranje employed, from petitioning to armed resistance, in order to fight perceived injustices.

Currently, a mass media campaign is underway in Turkey using a new communication means called the “public spot” (kamu spotu). This article concentrates on the public spots produced by Turkey’s Ministry of Health, and more specifically on those that advocate quitting smoking and preventing obesity. Drawing on interviews with Ministry of Health personnel and analyzing the content of these spots, we suggest that they operate as risk caveats. They caution individuals against smoking and obesity’s potential harms and guide her/him towards self-health governance by encouraging the maintenance of a particular lifestyle that embraces a balanced diet, regular activity, and no smoking. As such, we read these spots as a technique of neoliberal governmentality. This technique works primarily by responsibilizing individuals as health entrepreneurs investing in risk free lifestyles; that is, by conceptualizing health as a matter of self-conduct where personal responsibilities are emphasized.

In this article, we argue that insights concerning the word-based nature of morphology, especially the hypothesis that periphrastic expressions are cross-linguistically common exponents of lexical relations, permit a novel lexical constructional analysis of periphrastic predicates that preserves the restriction of morphosyntactic mapping operations, such as passive, to the lexicon. We do this in the context of the periphrastic Thai thuuk passive, justifying in detail the monoclausal status of the construction, its flat phrase structure, the semantics of affectedness associated with it, and its paradigmatic opposition with other passive constructions in the language. Building on the proposal of Bonami & Webelhuth (2013) and Bonami (2015) that a periphrase relies on a form of the main verb that selects collocationally for an auxiliary element, we develop an analysis of Thai periphrastic passives in which the surface syntax of these predicates is mediated by appropriate lexical representations. Crucially, the rearrangement of arguments in the passive is done lexically, via lexical rule, rather than in the syntax. The resulting analysis is consistent with the classical tradition of Word and Paradigm morphology, which posits periphrastic expression as one of several encoding strategies for the realization of morphosyntactic information within words.

In October 1934, agents from the Chinese Maritime Customs Service received a hot tip that an otherwise unremarkable village off the coast of Shandong was hiding valuable contraband. A search party dispatched to investigate verified the claim after raiding several homes and uncovering sixty-nine bags of sugar. Seeking to add to this already sizeable haul, agents then scaled the walls of another home and discovered ten more bags hidden in the backyard. This time, however, they were met by incensed homeowner Yu Guangbo, who charged at the intruders with a pitchfork and seriously injured an officer when he tried to seize a handgun. His resistance was fierce but, ultimately, futile. Outnumbered, Yu was quickly subdued, beaten, and bound. Left alone in the village temple, he untied himself the next day before reporting his harsh treatment to a local court and inaugurating a lawsuit that would last almost a decade.

This article will compare two novels: Moyshe Kulbak’s Montog (“Monday”) and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Each novel ends with the death of its protagonist, figured as both a senseless act and the apotheosis of its hero’s self-reflexive, ironic rejection of community, faith, and purpose. Drawing on theories of Hannah Arendt, this comparison proposes to read the two narratives and their preoccupation with incarceration, institutionalization, revolutionary activity, religion, and the family as profound yet oblique parables on the nature of privation, resistance, and commitment in the multiple senses. Indeed, by arguing on behalf of a “politics of failure,” this comparison proposes a methodology for reading Beckett and Kulbak postcolonially that in turn invites further consideration of the postcolonial status of expatriate Irish and early-Soviet Jewish cultures, respectively. This essay creates for the two narratives a community of elective affinity that neither author would have envisioned for himself, and thus demonstrates that their respective critiques of ideological progress—via their shared strategies of parody, linguistic marginality, and exile—fulfill an explicitly political function.