Erol Gülüm

Erol Gülüm is visiting fellow at FMSP from September 2021 to September 2022 and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Bilecik Seyh Edebali University in Turkey. He studied as a visiting scholarship researcher at The State University of New York at Binghamton in the U.S. A for a full year between 2015-2016. He held a Ph.D. in Folklore Studies from Hacettepe University in 2017. In his doctoral dissertation published in 2020, he focused on why and how traditional culture is used as a resource and reference frame in shaping the practices, behavior patterns, and cultural productions specific to the virtual environment and digital culture. His recent research interests include digital culture, memory studies, cultural tourism, mythology, cultural economy, cultural and creative industries, and intangible cultural heritage.

The working title of his recent postdoctoral project supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey is “A Presentist Framework for Repurposing of Folk Narrative Memory through Cultural and Creative Industries based Valorization and Mediation: The Turkish Cultural Context”. The primary research question of the project is how ancient oral/folk narrative memories, which have lost their contextual meanings, functions, actors (carriers and performers), media, practices, and gradually became passive in modern times, can be valorized, remediated, revitalized, and reused for/by/in the present with the agency of the cultural creative industry. Turkish cultural context, which has an ancient, deep-rooted, multinational, diverse, and creative but passive folk narrative memory, offers one of the most appropriate samples for putting into practice and testing the theoretical knowledge that will be produced as an answer to this question. Therefore, the focused aim of the project is to analyze the principles, processes, methodology, approaches, models, and techniques, and good practices of the ‘selective uses of the past/memory for contemporary purposes’, and eventually to develop a presentist framework for repurposing of Turkish folk narrative memory/heritage through cultural and creative industries based valorization and p/re/mediation. The ultimate goal of this interdisciplinary project is to understand, analyze, and evaluate the triadic symbiosis between the subject matter and the discipline of folklore, memory, and heritage.

 

Recent Publications:

Geleneksel kültür, medya müzeciliği ve Youtube (Traditional culture, medium museum, and YouTube). Folklore/Literature, 2019, 491-500.

Teorik ve pratik boyutlarıyla sanal ortam folkloru (The folklore of digital media: theoretical and practical dimensions). Grafiker, 2020.

Alevi-Bektaşi inanç belleğinin sosyal medyayla imtihanı: Youtube’daki semah kayıtları (The trial of Alevi-Bektashi’s collective faith memory with social media: The video recordings of semah on Youtube). Motif Academy Journal of Folklore, 2020, 1390-1405.

The trial of traditional Turkish culture with the auto-orientalist cultural industry. In I. Tombul and G. Sarı (eds.) Handbook of research on contemporary approaches to orientalism in media and beyond. 2021, 662-680.

Somut olmayan kültürel miras – kültürel yaratıcı endüstriler etkileşimlerine Kültürel İstatistikler Çerçevesi’nden bakmak (Looking at interactions between intangible cultural heritage and cultural creative industries through the Framework for Cultural Statistics (FCS) 2009. Motif Academy Journal of Folklore, 2021, 468-483.

“Kanonik imge, kültürel bellek ve sözlü edebiyat arasındaki simbiyotik ilişkilerin belirginleştirilmesi, açımlanması ve değerlendirilmesi” (Clarification, dissection and valorisation of the symbiotic relationships between canonical image, cultural memory and oral literature). Journal of Turkish World Studies, 2021, 211-229.

Warfare, oral tradition, and tourism: valorization of the folk narratives about the Gallipoli Campaign. In R. Baleiro and R. Baleiro (eds.), Handbook of research on global perspectives on literary tourism and film-induced tourism. 2021, (forthcoming).

“Yaşayan kültürel mirasın sermayelendirilmesi ve değerlemesi üzerine bir çözümleme” (An analysis of the capıtalization and valorization of living cultural herıtage). Journal of Social Policy Studies. 2021, (in progress).