Editors’ Introduction: Spring 2026

The Spring 2026 issue of New Perspectives on Turkey brings together a wide-ranging collection of scholarship that traverses temporalities, scales, and methodological approaches.Spanning from the late Ottoman period to the present, and from Cold War industrialization to contemporary socio-ecological crises, the contributions in issue no.74 interrogate governance, cultural transformation, religion, gender, class, and multispecies life in Turkey.Together, the articles explore how power is institutionalized, contested, aestheticized, embodied, narrated, and remembered across different domains of social life.We open this issue on a reflective note with Sema Erder's obituary, "In memory of Nermin Abadan: a tribute to the academic women of the founding generation."Erder not only honors Abadan's intellectual legacy but situates her within a broader cohort of pioneering women scholars who helped shape Turkish social sciences under challenging institutional and political conditions.The obituary that includes a discussion of intellectual trajectories of Mbeccel Kray and Behice Boran invites us to consider generational transmission, academic labor, and the gendered histories of knowledge production in Turkey.We anticipate that this work will serve as a valuable reference for future scholarship on women in the social sciences in Turkey.The main section of this issue contains thirteen research articles; four are included in a special dossier, while the other nine are stand-alone research papers.The Special Dossier is titled "Revisiting the History of Islam in Turkey through Novel Approaches," and was put together by guest editors Gken B. Din and Mark Soileau.The collection challenges essentialist portrayals of Islam in Turkey and proposes new conceptual and methodological pathways.In her own contribution, Din advances the concept of "Islam in Turkish" to rethink Sunni and Alevi religiosity beyond rigid doctrinal categories.Through a material approach to religious media, she shows how Mevlid, Karbala, and Eb Mslim books rendered Nur Muhammad and Ahl Al-Bayt tangible and accessible in vernacular forms, offering a framework that resonates with global debates on lived and vernacular Islam.The second article is by Zeynep Oktay and Ula zdemir and examines Alevi deyi as a dynamic oral and musical tradition.Grounded in theories of emotion, embodiment, and orality, their study highlights the fluidity of transmission and the performative recreation of communal identity across centuries, from Ottoman