As a critique of The Bell Curve, this article briefly explores ideas about intelligence, "race," and the relationship of those ideas to the place of Blacks in America's political economy. The analysis examines the role of intellectuals in their respective periods in shaping knowledge about intelligence and race. The eugenics movement, including its leaders, and the relationship of their ideas t…
This article offers a research tool for comparative studies of digital communication systems. It brings together the fields of infrastructure studies, Internet governance, and political economy of the Internet with the tradition of systemic media analysis and argues that existing frameworks are inadequate for capturing regulatory and power structures in a complex digital environment. In the art…
In 2016, Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg traveled to Lagos, Nigeria—the first stop on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa. The trip was a commercial endeavor, a digital capitalist exploration of the potential of Africa’s largest nation. Zuckerberg’s visit provides a critical lens for examining the colonizing tendencies of global media corporations and the context of Afric…
This article offers a new theoretical framework to understand nostalgia as a politicaleconomic and a cultural-political discourse in China. Introducing nostalgia as a “structure of feeling” in postreform China, the article analyzes its elevation as a new trope to address the economic and cultural contradictions of capitalistic global integration in the wake of the 2008 global financial c…
Problems of verification surrounded official claims concerning the role of WikiLeaks and Russia vis-a-vis the release of e-mails stolen from the Democratic National Convention before the U.S. federal election of 2016. In addition to the competing conspiracy theories and false stories promoted by fringe elements, major news organizations tailored their reporting to satisfy divergent truth market…
The mobile market is frequently described as an ecosystem where powerful companies generate value from continuously harvesting and distributing data. In this article, we advance the ecological metaphor through both theoretical conceptualizations and empirical explorations of the contemporary app ecosystem. We thereby contribute to the emergent field of app studies by critically scrutinizing…
The rise in world prices of natural resources, coupled with the resource discoveries induced by high prices, is transforming Africa's opportunities. The economic future of Africa will be determined by whether this opportunity is seized or missed. The history of resource extraction in Africa is not encouraging. This article reviews and develops the political economy of natural resources as a gui…
In the recent Turkish foreign policy literature, political economy approaches have started to emerge in addition to the burgeoning international relations analyses. The political economy perspectives that consider foreign policy as a complex web of dynamic interaction between politics, economics and international relations, contribute significantly to more comprehensively furthering the underst…
Since its emergence in the 1970s, international political economy (IPE) has been one of the main subfields of International Relations (IR) in North America and Britain. The past two decades have witnessed a growing academic interest in IPE among Turkish IR scholars. This study explores the emergence, evolution and the current state of IPE studies in Turkey. Based on an original dataset, it exam…
In this essay, I use a critical political economy of the attention economy to develop an understanding of the ways in which communication policies distribute communicative power. The policy issues I consider are Internet regulation, copyright, paracopyright, and advertising. Communication policies are analyzed in terms of their role in determining the conditions of audience practices and distri…