Dr. Özgün Eylül İşcen

Özgün Eylül İşcen is a media theorist whose scholarship engages with critical theory and audiovisual arts. She is currently an affiliated fellow at the ICI Berlin. İşcen received her Ph.D. in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures from Duke University, the United States in 2020. Her dissertation examines the geopolitical aesthetic of computational media as an imperial apparatus while focusing on countervisual artistic practices within the context of the Middle East. She has published in various edited book volumes and academic journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies and Organised Sound. She currently collaborates with Professor Shintaro Miyazaki for the project Counter-N, supported by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Book Chapters

“Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism: The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital,” in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press), pp. 91–115, 2022.

“The Mediated Sounds of Palestinian Exile: Technics and Memory in Bernard

Stiegler and Soundscape Studies,” In Sound, Media, Ecology, ed. by Milena Droumeva and Randolph Jordan, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 199-216, 2019.

“‘Once Upon A Time in Anatolia’: The Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics of Confronting

the Past in Turkey” in Animals, Plants, Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film, ed. by Irmak Ertuna and Hande Gurses, New York: Routledge, pp. 13-47, 2019.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

“The Racial Politics of Smart Urbanism: Dubai and Beirut as Two sides of the Same Coin,” In Special Issue: The Politics of Race and Racialisation in the Middle East, ed. by Burcu Ozcelik, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44:12, 2282-2303, 2021.

“Forensic Aesthetics for Militarized Drone Strikes: Affordances from Whom, and for

What Ends?” In Special Issue: Rethinking Affordance, ed by. Ashley Scarlett & Martin Zeilinger, Media Theory, 3 (1), pp. 239-268, 2019.

“In-between Soundscapes of Vancouver: Acoustic Experience of a City with a Sensory

Repertoire of Another Place,” Organised Sound, 19 (2), pp. 125-136, 2014.

Computational media and extractive capitalism

Smart urbanism from a transnational perspective

Media arts and histories beyond the Global North/South

Counter-futuring and decolonial politics

İşcen collaborates with Professor Shintaro Miyazaki for the project Counter-N, web-based publishing, exchange, and research collection on alternative histories and trajectories of computing. The project is supported by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.