Global issues

Take a tour of some of the world’s hottest issues! For more than a decade, Truman State University’s Global Issues Colloquium has been helping the Truman community understand many of the most challenging questions, conflicted responses and hopeful developments facing various governments and societies.

Thursday, November 7, 2024, 7pm, VH 1010, https://zoom.us/my/global.issues
Gokhan Mulayim
Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire: Work Precarity in Turkey’s Private Security Industry

Over the past two decades, Turkey’s private security industry has grown into one of the largest in Europe. The emergence of the contractual security market in 2004 coincided with neoliberal reforms that deregulated labor markets, resulting in an increasingly precarious workforce. Many workers facing precarity turned to the private security sector as a refuge from unstable employment. However, those who entered the sector encountered even deeper forms of precarity.

This talk presents an ethnographic analysis of the lived experiences of frontline private security guards in Istanbul, focusing on how insecurity arises not only from employment conditions but also from the activities performed on the job. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, I identify four interlocking forms of precarity—employment, legal, organizational, and relational—that generate uncertainties and vulnerabilities for guards. By shifting the focus from work as a static employment relationship to work as a fluid and dynamic activity, this talk offers a new analytical framework for understanding the complexities of precarious labor processes. Attendees will gain insight into how Turkey’s private security sector reflects broader trends of informalization, subcontracting, and regulatory gaps that are reshaping labor markets under neoliberalism.

Gökhan Mülayim holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University, with research interests in economic and cultural sociology, the sociology of work and organizations, and urban studies. His research explores how extra-economic goods and services are transformed into marketable objects and how such markets operate. His doctoral work, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, examines the economization of private security as a political, social, and affective service. Dr. Mülayim has taught at Boston University, Boston College, and Boğaziçi University and served as chief editor of the Accounts newsletter for the American Sociological Association’s Economic Sociology Section for four years. Beyond academia, he has contributed to large-scale research projects with private research firms and NGOs, focusing on political polarization, migration, gender data gaps, and women’s poverty in Turkey.

Thursday, January 16, 2025, 7pm, BH 102, https://zoom.us/my/global.issues
Matt Sharp, Research and Instruction Librarian, Truman State University
“Diplomacy and Faith: The Entanglements of the Late Ottoman State and Muslim Intellectuals with Western Converts to Islam”

William Henry Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932) and Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb (1846-1916) were notable British and American converts to Islam in the late 19th century. Quilliam led the Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI) from 1887 to 1908, and Webb founded the American Islamic Propaganda (AIP) from 1892 to 1896. Both promoted Islam through institutions, publications, and outreach in their respective countries. This talk delves into their connections with the Ottoman state and Middle Eastern Muslim intellectuals using the Ottoman archives and Arabic and Ottoman Turkish printed materials. I will discuss how Sultan Abdülhamid II, Ottoman diplomats, and Muslim intellectuals actively fostered relationships and spread news about these converts for diplomatic, geopolitical, and religious purposes. The talk explains the late Ottoman state’s entanglements with these converts as part of their image management efforts. It also considers how Muslim intellectuals framed Western converts as evidence of Islam’s universal appeal and relevance during an era of Western imperialism. The narratives of these convert communities shed light on Ottoman diplomacy, pan-Islamism, the concept of the Muslim world, and transnational Muslim thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a Middle East and Ottoman perspective.

In addition to serving as one of the Research and Instruction Librarians at Truman, Dr. Matt Sharp is an independent scholar of the Middle East whose work explores the exchanges and relationships between British and American converts to Islam and Ottoman state officials and Arab and Turkish Muslim intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He holds a PhD in Middle East Languages and Cultures from the University of Pennsylvania. For a decade, he lived in the Middle East (Amman, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon) where he also obtained an MA in Middle Eastern History from the American University of Beirut.

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