My TV Turkish Serials Subreddit receives more than 95 thousand visits weekly, and my colleague Alper Kırklar and I decided to curate an edited volume on Turkish Television Series. The series’ global attraction is definitely unintended, but all over the world, I come across people asking me about a particular Turkish series. So here we are with a book project!

Call for Chapters

Turkish Television Series in Transformation: Industry, Narrative, Power, and Global Circulation

Turkish television drama, widely known as the dizi, has emerged as one of the most significant transnational screen phenomena of the twenty-first century. As Turkish television has expanded beyond its national broadcast context into a globally circulating cultural industry, scholarship on the field has also grown rapidly. Foundational contributions by scholars such as Arzu Öztürkmen, Yeşim Kaptan, Ece Algan, and Ece Vitrinel have helped establish the key coordinates of Turkish television studies. Works such as Öztürkmen’s The Delight of Turkish Dizi: Memory, Genre and Politics of Television in Turkey and Kaptan and Algan’s Television in Turkey: Local Production, Transnational Expansion and Political Aspirations, together with subsequent special issues and articles on transnational production, audience reception, fan cultures, and platform-era transformations, have made it possible to think of Turkish television as a distinct and increasingly consolidated field of inquiry.

At the same time, the field remains marked by significant conceptual concentration. Existing scholarship has clustered heavily around a relatively limited set of dominant theoretical nodes — most notably soft power, neo-Ottoman geopolitics, and cultural proximity. These frameworks have been productive, but they have also left major dimensions of Turkish television underexamined: the operational realities of production, the political economy of labor, aesthetic vocabularies, class formation, environmental imaginaries, disability, translation politics, and the representation and erasure of minorities and queer communities. Meanwhile, the media landscape itself has undergone substantial transformation through the expansion of SVOD services, the restructuring of platform ecologies, and the growing reach of digital regulation under conditions of democratic backsliding and cultural polarization.

This edited volume builds on the existing foundations of the field while departing from them in decisive ways. First, it expands the thematic scope of Turkish television studies by foregrounding underexplored areas such as ecocriticism, environmental humanities, disability studies, class analysis, sound and aural aesthetics, AI-driven production practices, and audiovisual translation. Second, it places intersectional questions of representation and erasure at the center of inquiry, with particular attention to ethnic and religious minorities. Third, it brings the rapidly evolving SVOD landscape into sustained analytical focus, especially in relation to creative labor, narrative form, algorithmic governance, and regulatory politics. In methodological and theoretical terms, the volume seeks contributions that move beyond descriptive export-success narratives and instead draw on political economy, critical discourse analysis, platform studies, narrative theory, production studies, audience ethnography, ecocriticism, translation studies, and related approaches in order to produce multi-layered analyses of Turkish television in its current moment of transformation.

We welcome original chapter proposals examining Turkish television series as cultural, industrial, aesthetic, and political formations. Contributions may focus on historical or contemporary cases, broadcast or streaming environments, domestic or transnational circulation, and single-case or comparative perspectives. Interdisciplinary approaches are especially encouraged.

Topics

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Industry, labor, precarity, and financing
• Broadcasters, producers, and streaming platforms
• Serial form, genre, melodrama, and aesthetics
• Sound, costume, design, and spatial politics
• State power, nationalism, censorship, and regulation
• Minority, queer, and disability representation
• Class, urban transformation, and environmental imaginaries
• Audiences, fandom, and participatory cultures
• Platformization, algorithmic governance, and data cultures
• Global streaming services (including HBO Max/Max) in the Turkish market
• Dubbing, subtitling, format adaptation, and global recirculation

Proposal Guidelines

Please submit the following:

1. A working chapter title
2. An abstract of 300–500 words clearly outlining the central argument, theoretical framework, methodology, and empirical basis of the proposed chapter
3. A brief author biography of 100–150 words including institutional affiliation, research interests, and relevant publications
4. Full contact information: name, institutional affiliation, and email address

Completed chapters will be expected to be approximately 7,000–9,000 words (including references), written in English, and formatted according to the publisher’s style guide, which will be circulated upon acceptance. All chapters will undergo double-blind peer review.

We particularly encourage proposals grounded in empirical research — including ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, content analysis, archival work, discourse analysis, production studies, digital methods, and computational approaches — as well as contributions offering substantial theoretical innovation.

Key Dates

Editors

Erkan Saka, İstanbul Bilgi University

Alper Kırklar, İstanbul Bilgi University

Submissions and Inquiries

Please send chapter proposals and inquiries to: Erkan.saka@bilgi.edu.tr and Alper.kirklar@bilgi.edu.tr

Subject line: Turkish Television Series in Transformation — Chapter Proposal

This volume aims to make a substantial intervention in Turkish television studies and in wider debates on global television, platformization, media power, and transnational screen culture.