Biray Kolluoğlu has been a faculty member at the Department of Sociology at Boğaziçi University since 2002. After completing her BA at Middle East Technical University in 1989, she received her MA from the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University in 1994, and her PhD from the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University in the United States in 2002. Having worked as a researcher at the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg in 2004 and at the Vienna Institut für die Wissenschaften wom Menschen in 2020, Kolluoğlu has studies in the fields of parenting and education, urban sociology, historical sociology, and the sociology of space and memory. Having conducted research on the approaches of middle classes to education in Istanbul, spatial and social segregation dynamics, as well as Eastern Mediterranean port cities and civil society movements in Turkey, Kolluoğlu’s edited book titled Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the Present was translated into Turkish. Biray Kolluoğlu is also the editor of New Perspective on Turkey magazine. She also writes popular social science articles under the title Zappa Zamanlar.
Creating Meaning from Silence and Emptiness in Social Sciences
This paper is about the process of fieldwork in sociological research that leads the researcher to think about the possibilities of listening to silence. In other words, it is about learning to hear the voices and traces of silence and how this reshapes the research process and the interpretation of the findings. Just as the subjects of study are not chosen from an infinite and bottomless pool, but from a repertoire of autobiographies, framed by the dynamics, constraints and possibilities of the conditions and period we are in, the methods of meaning-making in research processes are also determined by what is contained in the subject we study. This article describes how, in a research project that set out to understand the transition from empire to national state through İzmir, the focus of the research shifted to the fire of İzmir in 1922 and the ways in which this fire has been included in social memory, as the echoes of the unspoken and unwritten began to be heard in the material provided by oral history narratives and written sources. From the gaps and silences encountered in the field, the emergence of the İzmir fire and the process of reshaping the research with the ecos trapped in the burned city are discussed. Arguing that there are constitutive gaps in the social memory of the İzmir fire, this article underlines the cultural and social productivity of this constitutive gap, which is shaped by silences, pauses, unwarranted changes in the narratives, and what is not told and written, from history books to newspaper articles. In conclusion, this discussion focuses on the role of silence in the production of meaning in social sciences in general, emphasizing the importance of listening to silence in reaching those conclusions rather than focusing on the findings and results of a research.