BARIS CAYLI messina, PhD
A Social and Cultural CritiC
Dr Baris Cayli Messina
Welcome to my personal website!
I am a British-Italian-Turkish scholar. I would define myself as a social and cultural critic as well as a feminist scholar based on my moral principles and the need to create a just and peaceful society in which all forms of systemic inequality need to be eradicated. My pronouns are he/him/his.
I am Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Lincoln. I am Book Series Editor of Temple Studies in Criminalization, History, and Society which is published by Temple University Press. I am Editor-in-Chief of International Social Science Journal (Wiley). I held Visiting Professor and Fellowship positions at the University of Palermo, LUMSA University, the University of Oxford, and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. I am Senior Research Affiliate of the TSAS, the Canadian Network for Terrorism, Security, and Society, and RUSI.
I am very happily married to Gioacchino Messina.
This personal website is intended to provide information about my works. To learn more about my research, teaching interests, publications, and current projects, please visit the related pages of this website. My media and public scholarship page and blog page contain posts, submission calls, and my views on current social, political, and cultural issues.
MY LATEST RESEARCH
BREAKING THE SILENCE ON FEMICIDE:
HOW WOMEN CHALLENGE EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE AND MALE VIOLENCE
Digital space has provided an important platform for women by enabling them to defy religious and patriarchal values while rendering their demands more visible in the public sphere. By analyzing the stories of 3349 murdered women, consulting 57 activist-published materials, studying 37 protest-focused videos, and using digital ethnography, this article explores Turkish women's struggles against femicide. I propose the emancipatory and democratizing counterpublics as an analytical concept to demonstrate how women challenge epistemic injustice and male violence. To this end, I investigate the struggles of women by studying their use of digital space as a means of breaking the silence on femicide, creating data, disseminating knowledge, and seeking justice. This article highlights the essential role of new media technologies in empowering vulnerable groups through the generation of new forms of knowledge, the formation of collective memory, and the elimination of epistemic injustice in opposition to the ruling authorities. The present study contributes to our knowledge of the sociology of epistemic injustice by demonstrating how digital space plays a limited but critical role in the efforts of activists living under authoritarian regimes to defend their fundamental rights to survive and prevent femicide, which has a devastating impact on the lives of millions of women
Cayli Messina, B. (2022) "Breaking the Silence on Femicide: How Women Challenge Epistemic Injustice and Male Violence" The British Journal of Sociology 73(4): 859-884.
BANDITS, BRIGANDS, AND MILITANTS:
THE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF OUTLAWS
Outlaws have been formidable local authorities throughout history and some of their stories survived thanks to poems, ballads, and plays within a culture deeply colored by violence, avenge, injustice, punishment, and state response against them. I underscore the role of power relationship in society to examine the emergence of outlaws and utilize it to deconstruct the social, political, and cultural conundrum. Consulting the British, Mexican, Bulgarian, U.S., Ottoman, and Brazilian archives, I attempt to theorize the activities of bandits, brigands, and militants within the global history of social dissent. I argue that if we employ social dissent as an instrumental concept, we can effectively determine both local factors and uncover global connections that explicate why various outlaws and societal reactions against them demonstrate astonishing similarities in distant geographies and different time periods. This study contributes to our knowledge in the historical sociology of outlaws by offering new theoretical ventures and highlighting methodological challenges in studying outlaws within the conundrum of crime, conflict, and violence.
Cayli Messina, B. (2021) "The Global History of Social Dissent: Deconstructing Outlaws within the Conundrum of Crime, Conflict, and Violence" Journal of Historical Sociology 34(3): 406-423.