Agamben defines the state of exception as a condition in which institutional rights are suspended while regulatory control persists. As a researcher whose former university was dissolved by decree, I work within such a space—not as one of epistemic absence, but of continuity through ongoing scientific production.
Since 2009, I have developed the **Physiotherapy E-Book Series (**e.g., Basic Kinesiological Analysis, Knee Arthroplasty Internship Book) as an Open Educational Resources initiative. After the institutional disruptions of 2016, this work has continued under conditions resembling a state of exception, sustaining educational access and disciplinary knowledge beyond formal university structures. In parallel, I maintain open-source tools and dataset repositories on platforms such as GitHub and Zenodo to support transparent and reproducible research.
The loss of formal institutional affiliation also brings infrastructural barriers. Many academic services—such as GitHub, Google Workspace, or Microsoft research programs—require .edu email verification or institutional credentials, effectively excluding universityless researchers. Under these conditions, access to PubMed Central’s open-access subset, together with personal computing and internet infrastructure, becomes one of the few remaining gateways to scientific participation.
For scholars operating under such conditions, Open Science is not merely an ideal but a practical foundation of epistemic continuity. I welcome perspectives, experiences, and suggestions on how Open Science contributions can be strengthened under conditions resembling a state of exception.
I am working on an initiative to provide Research Library access, guidance, resources, and support for IGDORE Scholars. We are in the information gathering phase of this effort. Would you like to help with that?
Thank you for your message. I highly appreciate IGDORE’s effort to address this systemic issue. Having experienced the practical challenges of sustaining academic production without formal institutional affiliation, I would be happy to share my insights.
I can specifically provide feedback on barriers related to accessing scientific literature, utilizing software and academic platforms that require .edu verification, and the needs regarding open-source data repositories. I look forward to hearing about the next steps.
I was hoping for a more straightforward effort that begins with mapping the landscape of services that deliver access along a spectrum of partial to full. I would also welcome help with grant writing to help with this issue, and it sounds like you are very familiar with all the reasons that justify a request for funding. The two tasks are related, and I would expect this initiative to take most of the year to organize and pursue. Your assistance could cut that timeline significantly.
Would you like to meet about it?
Thank you for your message. I would be very glad to meet and collaborate on both the landscape mapping and the grant writing efforts for this important initiative.
To help us prepare for our meeting, I would like to share a draft manuscript I have been working on. Currently, it is an unfinished draft, primarily due to the lack of an academic mentor and the absence of institutional support. However, it addresses the exact systemic issues we are discussing from a science policy perspective.
The manuscript (tentatively titled “Emergency Governance and University Closure”) focuses heavily on the structural mechanisms that sever researchers from the knowledge ecosystem. I believe this material can specifically contribute to the “epistemic exclusion” dimension of your grant writing. By framing the problem through concepts like “Spatial Exclusion” and the “Collapse of Epistemic Agency,” it provides a strong, academic justification for why independent scholars urgently need institutionalized access mechanisms.
Furthermore, to highlight the severe real-world consequences of this exclusion, I should also mention a dataset I have been compiling regarding “State of Emergency Suicides” (OHAL Dönemi İntiharları). Among approximately 80 verified suicide cases in this dataset, there is a distinct presence of academic suicides. This tragically underscores the “Policy-Induced Psychological Harm” that results from sudden and prolonged professional isolation.
If you could provide an email address, I would be happy to send this draft material to you. I believe it would be highly beneficial if you could briefly review it before our meeting, as it might help us structure our theoretical approach for the funding requests.
Please let me know what days or times work best for you to meet.