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.
We are actually targeted and our careers derailed, as the corruption within academia and elsewhere protects itself and each other -from it, the worse criminality and damages to our societies is allowed to continue rampant. I thank you for this and all initiatives to help each other, our informants and other victims thrive, speak up, rise awareness and sort the problems we face.
I invite you to this book, edited by myself, already approved for publication in late 2027:
As well as to this initiative to build open science digital infrastructure, embedding the mechanisms needed to disallow all that sort of corrupt power abuses. Open science includes the improvements needed for us all to work more safely. Criminals, corrupt ones, always hide their deeds -law is on our side, in our democratic countries, and it needs to be enforced.
They sever lives, not only researchers from safe working positions and tenure track, reserving it to already established players, allowed to be. From those cuts, further lives are cut short.
I have written numerous articles on LinkedIn, in both Turkish and English, examining how the physiotherapy community in Turkey abuses the gatekeeping function of faculties from the perspective of the sociology of science, along with practices that can be legally categorized under the umbrella term of mobbing. These writings, grounded in concrete data and documents, illustrate how academic cliques exclude talented young researchers through unlawful and arbitrary decisions—a systemic phenomenon observed in almost every country. The prevalence of these adverse events can arguably be attributed to the fact that the concepts within the sociology of science have not been sufficiently detailed in the context of academic disciplinary boards and legal proceedings, coupled with the research community’s tendency to refrain from protecting the victim.
However, the events that unfolded following the failed coup attempt in 2016 exist on a fundamentally different dimension, proceeding systematically within the framework of condemning individuals to “civil death.” Researchers saw the universities where they worked permanently closed, and their positions at state institutions were abruptly terminated. They were stripped of opportunities to find new employment, subjected to international travel bans, imprisoned, and put on trial. While some were ultimately acquitted, others were incarcerated. This profound process of structural and systemic exclusion has been ongoing since 2016.
In case you wish, this fits perfectly the book and event call. In the call itself myself points to a potential funding, small, individual, in the context of an EU COST one health education action awarded, which myself founded and now co-leads as inclusion and diversity officer. Myself is working on implementing open science standards to redress this systemic suicide-career system that filters out dissenting voices too early on even to register them as victims. The screenings get to create rotten silos of non-scientific opinionated, politically charged, economically interested, power abused positions everywhere we set sight on. Please, your reporting will be extremely welcome.
Through the book, we will publish. The event will raise further awareness. I aim to publish a paper, and aid authors and speakers in the task of also bringing more in, as required and asked.
The focus intended is more on illegal activities from criminal actors, i.e. logging operations, mining, poaching, and the like, and the reprisals against local communities and the professionals who do their best to aid. It is not the only topic, and I cannot wait to see all contributions. Please, when sharing, be mindful of the risks to informants and others. The peer review will be online, open, from abstract to every revision, respecting the level of comfort with transparency of each author, and the sensitivity of each particular contribution. It is mind blowing even physiotherapy gets to be politically charged.
Thank you for the encouraging response and the kind invitation. Integrating these findings into the framework of open science and systemic integrity aligns perfectly with the core issue.
As a starting point, I would like to draw your attention to a book I previously published titled OHAL Dönemi İntiharları (Suicides during the State of Emergency). Although the book is written in Turkish, it provides a crucial and documented foundation regarding the extreme outcomes of these exclusionary practices, specifically detailing the suicides of academicians. You can find the book on Google Play Books here: (ISBN: 978-605-71613-0-7).
While I have authored several other academic and technical books, this specific work stands out because it relies on highly concrete, field-level data. The gravity of its findings led to its inclusion in official parliamentary inquiries submitted to relevant ministries by MP Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu. Furthermore, I formally submitted this work to all Provincial Chief Public Prosecutor’s Offices across Turkey, accompanied by a documented call urging the legal system to exercise heightened sensitivity regarding the rights of individuals structurally dismissed by emergency decrees.
I believe the data and systemic analysis within this book could serve as a robust starting point for a paper or a chapter in your project, clearly demonstrating the severe realities of the “civil death” phenomenon.
Due to several ongoing manuscript revisions, I am currently unable to start drafting a chapter immediately. However, I believe I can contribute effectively within a planned schedule and under your supervision.
Your work is splendid. It fits perfect the scope of the book, as well. Do not worry about deadlines, consider your proposal accepted, and all flexible enough as to ensure it will get into the volume. We are aiming for publication late 2027, rolling reviews, without yet a hard deadline. I would say it is going to be about May next year, when we close it and send it to the publisher ready to distribute.
On my end, I am now working on extending the invitation to expert from the Southern hemisphere, or those who, coming from anywhere, having been subject to reprisals for reporting on what is ongoing against first peoples and similar cruelties. Genocides, ecocide. I will share, in a few weeks, how the list of co-authors and topics is shaping.
Just in case you came to know or are in touch with anyone who has worked on cases that verge torture in the EU, or are simply well within that threshold, against professionals to silence the work, that is also a priority in the volume. I thank you, Rafet, for your engagement in this publication. We will raise awareness of all ongoing, by this and the event, proper shared in the media. These are the issues holding societies down, ending lives. That social death, that often leading to suicide, is a terrible fate. My own work has been, partially, on the abuses of psychiatry to silence -a living hell, to trap people in alleged care, proper torture worse than horror movies, as if them insane, to silence as thoroughly as it gets. That reality on its own, without being such directed torture, already ends in that many suicides. I cannot bring a statistic, yet it is about one in ten taking their own life, once coerced: translating proper science, medical science too, into policies, is of paramount importance. It is horrible to see our systems abused as a weapon, gamed, corrupted. I hope we can bring it all, proper documented, to legislators, with proposals, as you have already achieved.