The LSE Chair for Contemporary Turkish Studies is delighted to announce the launch of a new public lecture series titled "Anthropology of Turkey and Beyond."
This interdisciplinary lecture series hosts academics invested in anthropological debates and/or ethnographic fieldwork on Turkey and connected geographies. The goal is to open up a critical space for deeper and critical analysis of culture, religion, and politics in Turkey, among Turkey's diasporic populations and across other relevant regions. Speakers are expected to address, through their research, different aspects of past, present and future complexities of contemporary Turkey and proximate contexts, revealing connections between different life practices and processes in multiple spaces and temporalities.
Unless otherwise stated, lectures in this series will take place throughout the 2016-17 academic year on the last Wednesday of every month between 6.30pm and 8pm at Room 1.11, Cowdray House, 6 Portugal Street, LSE.
Admission is free, open to all, and on a first-come-first-served basis.
Wednesday, 28 September 2016
Lecture title: Remaking the Middle East through Violence and Magic: The Examples of ISIS and YPG
Speaker: Dr Nazan Üstündağ (Boğaziçi University, Turkey)
Dr Nazan Üstündağ is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University. She received her PhD from Indiana University. Her interests include theories of modernity and postcoloniality, feminist studies, ethnography of the state, state and violence and resistance. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript on how state violence has been inscribed on the things, spaces, bodies, as well as visual and written documents in and on Kurdistan. Besides her academic interests, she also writes for political journals and newspapers. She is a founding member of the Peace Parliament and Academics for Peace, as well as a member of Women for Peace.
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: COW 1.11
Chair: Associate Prof. Esra Özyürek, the LSE Chair for Contemporary Turkish Studies
Wednesday, 30 November 2016
Lecture title: Building Witnesses: Turkey’s Architecture of “Facing and Reckoning with the Past”
Speaker: Dr Eray Çaylı (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture & LSE European Institute)
Eray Çaylı is a researcher, educator and writer at the interface of architecture/art and anthropology. Eray’s PhD (University College London, 2015) studied the relationship between urban/architectural space and discourses of "facing and reckoning with the past" in Turkey, and is currently the subject of a book project he is working on. More broadly, in both his research and his teaching, Eray explores the ways in which the built environment shapes, and is shaped by, conflict, disaster and protest. He currently works as a researcher at the LSE European Institute, and teaches architectural history and theory at UCL's Bartlett School of Architecture and the Syracuse University School of Architecture (London programme).
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: COW 1.11
Chair: Associate Prof. Esra Özyürek, the LSE Chair for Contemporary Turkish Studies
Wednesday, 25 January 2017
Lecture title: Building a Dam, Fixing a Nation: An Infrastructural Ethnography of Turkey
Speaker: Dr Laurent Dissard (Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL)
Dr Laurent Dissard's research examines how Turkey’s efforts to 'modernise' through infrastructural development have simultaneously redefined the future and the past of the nation. Located within the disciplines of Sociocultural Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, his work also finds inspiration in the fields of Material Culture Studies, Political Ecology and Middle East Studies. His book project Submerged Stories: Dams and Cultural Erasure in Eastern Turkey takes dams as symbols of Turkey’s 'modernisation' and their associated reservoirs - artificial lakes inundating river valleys and their cultural heritage - as metaphors for the country’s 'submerged stories'. Before joining the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, Laurent completed his PhD in Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley (2011), received a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania (2013) and was Associate Researcher at the Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes in Istanbul (2014).
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: COW 1.11
Chair: Associate Prof. Esra Özyürek, the LSE Chair for Contemporary Turkish Studies
Wednesday, 22 February 2017
Lecture title: TBC
Speaker: Dr Yael Navaro (University of Cambridge Division of Social Anthropology)
Born in Istanbul, Dr Yael Navaro completed her undergraduate education at Brandeis University (Sociology 1991) and her masters and PhD at Princeton University (Anthropology 1998). She was Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (1997-1999) and has been teaching at the University of Cambridge since 1999. She is presently Reader in Social Anthropology in the Division of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and College Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Newnham College. Her research to date has explored affect and subjectivity in the domains of politics, the public sphere, law, and bureaucracy. Her first book Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2002) studied the production of a state-revering culture in Turkey through ethnographic work on the interface between secularism and Islamism. This work then led her to study the unrecognized state in Northern Cyprus and its administration through questions about affect in a postwar environment, which materialized in her second book The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke University Press, 2012) based on ethnographic research on affect in zones of ruination and abandonment, in materialities left behind and expropriated in the aftermath of war, as well as in the documentary practices, administration, and economy of an unrecognized state. Between January 2012 and December 2016, she conducted full time research as Principal Investigator on a European Research Council (ERC) project titled "Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey."
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: COW 1.11
Chair: Associate Prof. Esra Özyürek, the LSE Chair for Contemporary Turkish Studies
Wednesday, 29 March 2017
***Please note that this lecture will take place in Room 2.04 at Tower Two (Clement's Inn Passage, London WC2A 2AZ)***
Lecture title: TBC
Speaker: Dr Rebecca Bryant (Hellenic Observatory, LSE)
Rebecca (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is an anthropologist of politics and law whose work has focused on ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, transitional justice, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line, as well as in Greece and Turkey. She was previously Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University in the U.S. and has taught at the American University in Cairo, Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, and Cornell University. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her current research uses ethnographic research in the unrecognized state in Cyprus’ north for a comparative project on everyday life in de facto states. She is the U.K. Principal Investigator of a 30-month collaborative research project, with Koç University in Istanbul, ‘Integration and Well-Being of Syrian Youth in Turkey’, funded by the Research Councils of the U.K. and the Turkish research council (TÜBİTAK). The project aims at assessing the needs of youth whose status has shifted from refugee to immigrant as a result of the prolonged conflict, and at developing concrete organisational and policy suggestions for social and economic integration.
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: TW2 2.04
Chair: Associate Prof. Esra Özyürek, the LSE Chair for Contemporary Turkish Studies