Congratulations to two AMER graduates, Elif Zülal Köse (2026) and Metehan Kandemir (2025) for having their work published in academic journals this year!
Elif’s article “Marriage or Death: Salvation within Patriarchy An Analysis of Female Autonomy in Aşkı Memnu,” was published in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, Vol. 11 No. 1 (Summer 2026). This essay examines the complex relationship between characters Bihter Ziyagil and her mother Firdevs Yöreoğlu in the Turkish drama series Aşkı Memnu (2008–2010), an adaptation of Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil’s 1899 novel. Bihter’s desire to separate from her mother’s scandalous reputation puts her in a position where she struggles to keep up with the demands of society as well as her own needs and desires as a woman. Unable to find happiness in her marriage or in a secret affair with her husband’s nephew, Bihter embraces her similarity to Firdevs, which ultimately leads to her self-destruction. Her final act of suicide is not merely a punishment for her immoral actions but her salvation from the judgment of patriarchal society.
To read Elif’s article in full, click here.
Metehan’s piece is a book review, co-authored with William Morgan, titled “A Permanent Condition of First Contact: Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” published in the 2026 issue of Technophany: A Journal for Philosophy and Technology. The review argues that Bogna Konior’s The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025) departs from the “socially engaged journalism” that dominates internet scholarship to recover an older link between computation and ufology, recasting the internet as a site of first contact. Drawing on Liu Cixin’s game-theoretic answer to the Fermi Paradox, Konior underscores AI systems’ continuous ingestion of online communication as training data, arguing that it collapses the distinction between speaking about and speaking to algorithms. Intelligence, in her account, inheres in strategic concealment, yielding an “inverse Turing Test” in which genuine cognition would remain undetectable. The review suggests that Konior’s text may itself function as an adversarial payload, encoding structural indeterminacy into the datasets it ostensibly theorizes. For audiences who have grown weary of emancipatory manifestos and the defeatist critiques that shadow them, our authors argue, Konior provides a realism sturdy enough to inhabit the forest without surrendering to it.
The entire review can be found here.
