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Ayhan Akman
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Sabanci University
Orhanli, Tuzla, Istanbul, 34956 Turkey

Office Phone:+90-216-483-9242
Fax Number: +90-216-483-9250
Email: ayhan@sabanciuniv.edu
Webpage: http://people.sabanciuniv.edu/~ayhan/

During the 2006-07 academic year, I will be on sabbatical leave from Sabanci University. From September 2006 to March 2007 and during the summer months of 2007, I will be doing fieldwork in Greece as a receipient of the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y) posdoctoral fellowship award.

My research project is titled: “Civil Society Without Individualism: The Study of Religiously Motivated NGOs in Greece and Turkey” and its main aim is to compare the normative orientations of NGOs in Turkey and Greece. Specifically, I intend to study religiously motivated NGOs in order to investigate the possibility of understanding civil society outside of the liberal framework. I argue that rather than being definitive of civil society in general (for all times and all places), individualism offers only one, culturally specific kind of foundation on which a pluralistic, tolerant model of social coexistence can be built. What intrigues me is the possibility of finding non-individualistic, communitarian or religious basis on which different societies can function both as a counter-weight to state power and manage their coexistence in a civil, non-violent and tolerant manner.

During the Spring Semester of 2007, I will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, located at the University of Chicago.