profile picture of Talha Issevenler

Talha Issevenler

Ph.D.

Department

Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Office

226 Barnard Hall
3009 Broadway,
New York, NY 10027, USA

Contact

CV

Dr. Talha Can Işsevenler is a theoretical and ethnographic sociologist with focuses on temporality, technology and power. He is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sociology at City College of New York and Hunter College.

His work explores transformation of subjectivity, narrativity and political capacities as they are situated in between different technical arrangements of temporality —on the move from disciplinary, televisual and national time towards rhythmic/interruptive, non-synchronized algorithmic networked time of hybrid populations. He questions how evolved types of identity and narrativity function to suture, stich, normalize and disavow the discontinuity brought by algorithmic temporality on collective historical consciousness. Thus, his work is a search for new grounds of analyzing arrangements of power/knowledge that act on the temporality of the body beyond the focus on language and ideology in order to see the effect of authorized discourses and political technologies. To specify the historicity of technical time, he conducts formal analyses of new framings of time on social media platforms such as algorithmically customized timelines, vertical and horizontal feeds, ‘Stories.’ He situates the impact of these new forms of organizing subjective, social and nonhuman time in relation to the capitalist strategies of surplus-value extraction out of an abundance of circulating data and in relation to the discontinuous temporalities of political culture by drawing on his ethnographic research on protest movements and participant-observant research on digital culture.

Dr. Issevenler is a specialist on Friedrich Nietzsche. His philosophical work traces the foundational influence of Nietzsche’s thinking on time, power and sciences in the fields of philosophy of time/historicity, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and genealogies of subjectivity/knowledge/power. A condensed statement of his thesis on the algorithmic expansion and disavowal of temporal power has recently been published in The Agonist: A Nietzsche Circle Journal. His short essay on dissonances of political epistemologies as they operate in the regime of deportability has appeared on the social anatomy of deportation regime. His collaborative work on new media, philosophy and temporality has appeared in Departures in Qualitative Research and in The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology. He is a founding member of research collective House of Time where he currently runs the public reading group called Psyche(d) with Tempo. Dr. Issevenler is also an analytical candidate at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.