Manzara

Lectern Journal Volume: I Issue: I

About This Issue

The first issue of Lectern Journal marks the beginning of a collective journey of thought, creation, and resistance. Emerging from the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of Boğaziçi University, the journal aims to build a space where knowledge is shared freely across disciplines, generations, and languages.

This inaugural volume brings together twelve essays exploring the intersections of history, philosophy, art, and political economy. It opens with a study on capital accumulation and the moral crisis of modern academia, followed by a reflection on 17th-century London’s plague registries and their relation to biopolitical control. The issue then turns to the transformation of commons under neoliberalism, the repetition of failure in modern cinema, and archival traces of fugitive slaves in Ottoman Üsküdar.

Other essays trace the tension between action and reactivity in modern life, colonial language hierarchies in Ottoman bureaucracy, and regional variations in Turkish religiosity. Historical and aesthetic analyses unfold in studies on the rise of the Manchu state, the afterlife of artworks, and temporal dislocations of Erasmus life. The volume concludes with an essay on the codification of the Arabic script as a political and cultural project.

Together, these texts form a chorus of perspectives bound by one conviction: that thought, when shared, becomes a form of freedom. Lectern Journal stands not only as a publication but as a declaration that critical writing can still open spaces of resistance, meaning, and collective imagination.

Editorial Board

Editor-in-Chief: Ahmet Haktan Canpolat
Editors: Fırat Güney, Elif Sustam
Associate Editors: Selin Ongan, Doruk Karaman

Review Board

Ahmet Haktan Canpolat, Elif Sustam, Fırat Güney, Selin Ongan, Doruk Karaman, Arzu Nisan Acemi, Yağmur Söker, Emre Kahraman, Elif Limon, Kerem Mazman, Mustafa Gökberk Çelik

Art Committee

Gupse Bolat, Argun Ulaş Yağcı

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank Umut Zeren, Giray Demirci, İsmail Dinç, Doğan Özdil, Efdal Kaplan, Çağlar Ilgın Sakaoğlu, Ömer Şemsi Türk, and Özgür Aydın Sarıcıoğlu for their guidance and contribution to this first issue.

In Memoriam

Dedicated to the memory of Jane Goodall (1934–2025) — whose lifelong devotion to empathy, nature, and knowledge continues to guide our work.

From the Lectern

“Freedom, like knowledge, is indivisible.
It exists not in the decrees of institutions
but in the minds that dare to question them.”
— Ahmet Haktan Canpolat, Editor-in-Chief

© 2025 Manzara Dergi. All rights reserved.

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Lectern Journal Volume I Issue I

Table of Contents

  1. Questioning the Paradigm: The Roots of Capital Accumulation and the Crisis of Contemporary Academia
  2. A Brief Discussion On The Searchers Of The 17th Century London And Conceptions Regarding Them, Disease Identification And The Historiography
  3. Commons in the Neoliberal Era: An Analysis of Transformation, Threat, and Resistance
  4. La Salaire De La Peur & Its Remakes: An Endless Circle Of Unsuccess
  5. Tracing the Stories of Russian Fugitive Slaves in 16th Century Üsküdar
  6. Action–Reaction: On the Edge of Reactivity
  7. Class, Language, And The ‘Colonial’ Mindset In Süleyman Penah Efendi: Imaging Greeks And Albanians In 18th-Century Ottoman Bureaucracy
  8. Religion in Practice: Regional and Demographic Variation in Turkish Religiosity
  9. Rise of The Manchu Dragon
  10. The Afterlife of the Artwork
  11. Clock Time, Politics, and Disrupted Rhythms: Temporalities of my Erasmus Life Between Utrecht and Istanbul
  12. An Examination of the Codification of the Arabic Script as a Tool for Cultural, Political, and Religious Legitimacy