College of Staten Island Professor of Media Culture Bilge Yesil has been awarded the Distinguished Scholarship Award – Best Book of 2025 from the National Communication Association’s International and Intercultural Communication Division. The award recognizes Yesil’s latest book, Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order, for its outstanding contribution to the study of international communication.
Published in 2024, Talking Back to the West offers a critical examination of how Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has sought to reposition the country on the world stage. In the 2010s, the AKP launched an English-language media system to elevate Turkey’s image, counter Western criticism of its increasingly authoritarian practices, and promote its own geopolitical and economic interests. Read more in CSI today
