The Department of Sociology is organizing a series of “Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquiums” starting from the 2022-2023 fall term. The first of the colloquiums was held in the Department of Sciences and Letters and featured academics from Princeton University, the École pratique des Hautes études (EPHE), Izmir Bakırçay University, and Istanbul Technical University, in a wide variety of topics including architecture and material politics in the Ottoman Empire, gender equity and fairness in digital food markets, apocalypse from a tardo-antique tradition perspective and medieval automata interpretations.

Every Wednesday between the 18th of November 18 and the 7th of December ITU Sociology department held the first of the annual "Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquiums" where students, professors, and intellectuals took the opportunity to meet notable international and national scholars in a wide variety of fields.

The colloquium started with Dr. Eda Acara who is an assistant professor in the department of geography at Bakircay University, Izmir. She previously worked in the department of sociology at Baskent University and in the Urban Policy Planning and Local Governments program at Middle East Technical University. In her presentation “Gender Equity and Fairness in Socio-Technical Assemblages of Digital Food Markets in Turkey” she discussed female farmers in Turkey, their visibility, and usage of digital food markets.

For the second week, we welcomed Florence Somer from the École pratique des Hautes études (EPHE), France. She is a master’s graduate from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, and currently, she is a doctoral student at EPHE. She previously worked as a professional journalist where she produced cultural documentaries in Persian, allowing her to travel to Afghanistan and Iran. Her speech titled “Apocalypse now: A View From a tardo-antique tradition perspective” was based on her thesis, in which she aims to propose an edition of an unpublished text based on Persian and Arabic manuscripts on the topic of the apocalypse which has not been systematically studied before her.

Our third guest Patricia Blessing is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. She specializes in Islamic art and architecture. She is the author of Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014) and Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Blessing is the Managing Editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. She gave a presentation called “Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Empire”.

The closing presentation came from Dr. Geoffrey Bowe from Istanbul Technical University called "Albert, and Aristotle: Wonder and the Devil in Details". He holds a Doctorate from Canada's McMaster University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Athens, Greece. As a philosopher, his books include "The Platonic Metaphysical Hierarchy (2004)" and "Platon'un Devlet'i Üzerine Makaleler (2019)".