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Interestingly enough, ebbs and flows in Türkiye-EU relations during all those years left this academic interest intact and since the 1960s, the most established Turkish universities kept opening European Studies Centres including METU and has been involved in extensive research and teaching activities famously known all over by European academia. In this respect, with its openness to the civil society, accumulated knowledge on EU integration and academic expertise to explore the correlation between academic knowledge and everyday information on European integration, CES-METU has been a significant initiative with its potential to foster development of novel teaching, research and knowledge exchange within the epistemic community in Türkiye. Outside the EU, and in the immediate neighbourhood in particular, EU scholarship has traditionally been dominated by research and material produced within the EU, recycling dependency structures and the academic framework set by the European integration. [...]it creates a particular dilemma on the part of the European Studies researchers from non-EU countries that they either have to keep their original and critical perspective within the European Studies and get unheard and unpublished, or they have to adopt mainstream approaches to the EU, thereby being able to be heard in the academic circles. Within the European Studies discipline in Türkiye, epistemic diversity has remained fairly limited given the lack of geographic diversity in authorship knowledge production in EU-Türkiye studies and has been mainly Eurocentric due to the almost exclusive use of grand and up-and-coming theories/concepts of European integration. [...]the proliferation of issue areas since the launch of the discipline has not culminated in a strong focus on non- traditional, avant-garde research topics as such (Turhan and Süleymanoëlu-Kürüm, 2022: 290).