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Short abstract:

On the basis of Dewey’s distinction between “things experienced ” and “having an experience,” I will share the materials of my experience as an STS scholar in Turkey in the last seven years and actively invite workshop participants to reflect on their experiences, and imagine futures of academia.

Long abstract:

John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), makes a distinction between “things experienced ” and “having an experience” in a nuanced way. We can go through multiple processes, experience new things and learn in the process, but this does not necessarily constitute an experience. Given either external or internal dynamics, we can start doing something and then stop. In contrast to such things experienced, one becomes having an experience as the materials of experience run its course and reach the end. The materials of an experience go through multiple connected events while progressing towards its own completion. I encountered Dewey’s thinking on ‘experience’ at the time I was contemplating over the patterns in my coping mechanisms for going-ons in academic life. I realized I had gone through multiple experiences in Turkey’s academic landscape as an STS scholar, but did not necessarily have an experience: I was not able to concurrently build embodied presence of my thinking. There were mostly multiple experiments and obstacles experienced. In this workshop, I will share the materials of my experience as an STS scholar in Turkey in the last seven years, their connections, and the moment of feeling a completion. I will actively invite workshop participants to share their stories of settling/unsettling as an academic in these times of fragmentation, and creatively reflect on the things experienced and their experiments while living in paradoxes. These stories will be constituting departure points to collectively imagine potential futures of academia/STS through the association of ideas.