London School of
Economics and Political Science (LSE)
In the past ten years something unexpected, but long
overdue, started to unfold in Turkey. A new interest in history emerged in a
country that had erased its Ottoman past. More surprising, the most traumatic
aspects of Turkish history, especially those that were considered taboo, or
simply denied until recently, became issues of public debate. Even though still
a minority, citizens of diverse backgrounds have begun commemorating the
Armenian Genocide, the Dersim and Maraş massacres, the Wealth Tax, and expulsions
of Greeks. At the face of an official policy of denial, increasing number of
activists, artists, scholars, and citizens demand a deeper understanding and
recognition of past atrocities in order to atone and seek justice.
This 3-days conference explores how, why, under what
conditions, and among which groups did willingness to confront the Armenian
Genocide and other violent episodes Turkish history came into being. What kinds
of strategies are used by different groups to promote coming to terms with the
past as well as avoiding it? What transformative power can we expect from this
numerically limited but strongly articulated movement? What are the
implications of encountering the past for contemporary dynamics in Turkey? By
doing so, it is hoped that the conference will contribute to promoting acts of
reconciliation that have begun in Turkey.
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
________________
Monday, 11 May 2015
Venue: Room STC. S75, Ground Floor, St. Clements
Building, LSE ___________________________________________________________________________
18:00 – 20:00 Opening Panel
Paper Titles and Speakers “Violence, Survival,
Sovereignty”
Marc Nichanian, Visiting Professor, Sabancı University,
İstanbul
“The Impact of Refusal to Encounter the Past on Turkish
State and Society”
Fatma Müge Göçek, Professor of Sociology and Women's
Studies, University of Michigan
“Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in
the Cultural Imaginary” Max Silverman, Professor of French, School of
Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds
Moderator: Esra Özyürek, Associate Professor, Chair for
Contemporary Turkish Studies, European Institute, LSE
________________
Tuesday, 12 May 2015
Venue: Graham Wallace Room, 5th Floor, Old Building, LSE
___________________________________________________________________________
10:00 – 12:30 Panel I
Paper Titles and Speakers “Lost in Translation: The
Monument’s Demolishing”
Ayda Erbal, Adjunct Professor and PhD Candidate,
Department of Politics, New York University “Change and Continuity in the
Politics of Denial: A Comparative Look at Reconciliation Discourses in Turkey”
Bilgin Ayata, Department of Political Science, Centre for Transnational
Relations, Foreign and Security Policy, Freie Universität Berlin
“Commemoration and Denial: Holocaust and Armenian
Genocide in Public Memory in Turkey”
Corry Guttstadt, Lecturer for Turkish Studies, Hamburg
University, Germany
“Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism: Neo-Ottomanism,
Humanism, Branding the Nation and Civilization in Contemporary Turkey” Aslı
Iğsız, Assistant Professor of Culture and Representation, Department of Middle
Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University Moderator: Marc David Baer,
Professor of International History, Department of International History, LSE
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 16:00 Panel II
Paper Titles and Speakers “Re-Making Life between the
Weight of the Past and Void of Future: Ethnographic Explorations on Daily
Encounters between the Cow, Villager and Returnee in a Ghost Village of Midyat,
Turkey”
Zerrin Özlem Biner, Research Associate, Division of
Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge “Moral Domains of Return” Ceren
Özgül, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
“Debt of the Dead: Hunting for Treasures in what was Once
Also Western Armenia”
Alice von Bieberstein, Postdoctoral Research Associate,
University of Cambridge
Moderator: Hakan Seçkinelgin, Associate Professor,
Department of Social Policy, LSE
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee Break
16:30 – 19:00 Panel III
Paper Titles and Speakers “Spaces of Education, States of
Ruination and Survival” Ayşe Parla, Associate Professor of Anthropology,
Sabancı University, İstanbul “Narratives of Survival: Gender, Memory and the
Armenian Genocide”
Ayşe Gül Altınay, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
Sabancı University, İstanbul “Landscapes of Memory and Forgetting: Facing the
Armenian Genocide in 2015”
Sossie Kasbarian, Lecturer in Middle East Politics,
University of Lancaster
“Cutting Manhood: A Phallic Genealogy for the Turkish
State Sovereignty across Two Fin-de-siècles” Serap Ruken Şengül, Manoogian
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Armenian Studies Programme, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor
Moderator: Esra Özyürek, Associate Professor, Chair for
Contemporary Turkish Studies, European Institute, LSE
________________
Wednesday, 13 May 2015
Venue: Room STC.S221, 2nd Floor, St. Clements Building,
LSE ___________________________________________________________________________
09:30 – 12:00 Panel I
Paper Titles and Speakers “Bûka Baranê (Bride of the
Rain): A Documentary about the 90’s Truth Telling in Divided Societies”
Murat Çelikkan, Co-Director of Truth Justice Memory
Center in İstanbul “Yüzleşme from a Psycho-Political Perspective”
Murat Paker, Department of Psychology, İstanbul Bilgi
University
“Encountering the Past in Turkey: A Personal Reflection
on Two Decades of Research and Experience”
Leyla Neyzi, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı
University, İstanbul
“Encountering National Histories, Encountering Global
Histories: Turkey, Armenia and the First World War Centenary”
Joanne Laycock, Senior Lecturer in Modern History,
Sheffield Hallam University
Moderator: Armine Ishkanian, Assistant Professor,
Department of Social Policy, LSE
12:00 – 12:30 Coffee Break
12:30 – 13:15 Final Discussion
This event is free and open to all. No ticket is
required.
For further information about the LSE Contemporary
Turkish Studies and its seminars and other activities, please contact:
E-mail: euroinst.turkish.studies@lse.ac.uk or Tel: +44
(020) 7955 6067
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/Research/ContemporaryTurkishStudies/Home.aspx
Paper Abstracts:
“Violence, Survival, Sovereignty” Professor Marc
Nichanian
In my book, La Perversion historiographique (Léo
Scheer/Lignes, 2006), I wrote the following, without offering any further
explanation: "Do subject peoples have anything to say about the sovereign
people and about the political system in which the latter made them live, in
what was after all a system of domination? Do they have anything to say of the
system of subjection and of its catastrophic collapse?" (the English
translation is by Gil Anidjar, The Historiographic Perversion, Columbia Univ.
Press, 2009, p. 53). The explanation has been given and developed first in my
2008 book in French Le Roman de la Catastrophe, and again in my 2010 book in
Turkish, Edebiyat ve Felaket. "Catastrophe" is the name for the
apo-calyptic end of a system of subjection, which coincided with a (both
universal and murderous) transformation of the regime of sovereignty. This at
least is the understanding and interpretation of the Catastrophe offered by an
Armenian novelist and literary critic, Hagop Oshagan. Why should literature
know more about the genocidal events that brought an end to the existence of
the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, more than historians, let's say? Be-cause
there is no archive for the end of a system of subjection and the violent
transformation of a regime of sovereignty, no other archive than the
paradoxical experience of the survivor. Consequently is no other memory of the
catastrophic event. The fact is that both sides, victims and perpetrators
alike, need to understand what happened, they therefore need the work of
interpretation (just as the patient of a psychoanalyst needs the same work of
interpretation), even if after so many years there is nothing left but some
sort of survival on the one side, and some (new) sort of sovereignty on the
other side. Without the work of interpretation, there will be no recovery, no
mourning, no reconciliation on the horizon. Both sides need to understand, yes.
But because up to now (as a consequence of a strange complicity between the
survivor and the sovereign) the events have been the private ground of the
historians, the only interpretation that is available on the market is that of
a conflict between belligerent nationalisms. Which is tantamount to adding
insult or injury, again on both sides. We then need first to get rid of that
type of purposely naive interpretations, in order to disentangle the complicity
between survival and sovereignty, and to begin a work of memory, to enter into
the time of forgiveness.
“The Impact of Refusal to Encounter the Past on Turkish
State and Society”
Professor Fatma Müge Göçek
Even though many scholars agree that encountering the
past enables states and societies to become more tolerant, democratic, and
egalitarian, there is much less work done on what refusal to do so entails. In
this paper, I will specifically discuss the impact of denial through history of
the violence committed by Turkish state and society against the Armenians. I
will also reflect on how this impact may compare to other cases of collective
violence.
“Lost in Translation: The Monument’s Demolishing”
Ayda Erbal
The annals of Turkish-Armenian “rapprochement,”
“reconciliation,” “initiative,” and “dialogue” marked January 8, 2011 as the
day when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called the Monument of “Humanity”
by Mehmet Aksoy in Kars a freak (ucube), and ordered
its demolition. Although the parties to the discussion
became divided among “conservative” “nationalist hawks” (who were against the
statue) and “non-nationalist” “progressive” “doves” (who wholeheartedly
embraced both the statue’s concept and its implementation), there were no
wide-scale public deliberation either about the decision-making process or
about the concept itself, or about its execution. Much like the “apology”
campaign, there also was not any wide-scale deliberation, neither with diaspora
Armenians, nor with Armenians from Armenia to whom the monument was addressed.
Armenians, just as they have been erased from the land, also were erased from
the debate. The Turkish—but not the Armenian--public was informed several times
in the course of the construction that this is a monument built to counter the
spatial/politico-historical arguments of not one but two monuments, both the
Iğdır Monument and the Tsitsernakaberd.
What can we learn from this particular episode of history
about the limits of the civil society in a setting where there is no normative
commitment to a post-genocidal institutional order? How come Humanity was
recast as contra-genocide recognition? What do the Monument debates tell us
about the political responsibilities of the majority, not only vis-à-vis the
Armenian Genocide but also in terms of its textual and spatial representations?
Why can the actors in Turkish civil society not differentiate themselves
radically from the state’s representation of the other as the one who has to
abide by the rules of the top down and overbearing peace fantasies of the
spatial colonizer?
This paper will deal with these questions and others by
analysing the elements, the context and the symbolic grammar of both the
Monument and the faux-substantial binary debates surrounding it. The
subsections of the paper deal with the deliberative quality of this monument by
way of positing it against other monuments or monumental ventures within
Turkish lieux de memoire and other comparative settings. I argue that just as
the representations of the victims of the Armenian Genocide have been
problematic in the Turkish historiography, their artistic representations as
well as discursive reframing within the contemporary Turkish “progressive”
public sphere has been marred with the same kind of asymmetrical power which is
itself the result of the Genocide. “Change and Continuity in the Politics of
Denial: A Comparative Look at Reconciliation Discourses in Turkey” Dr. Bilgin
Ayata Denialism has been a persistent repertoire of official politics and
public discourse in Turkey. From the 1930s onwards, the very existence of Kurds
was denied, and aspirations for its recognition have been vehemently
persecuted. The annihilation of Armenians and other Non-Muslim communities during
1915-1918 is even after a century not being officially acknowledged as Genocide
and constituted for the longest time an untouchable topic in public discourse.
The military operation against 'the abscess of the Republic' in Dersim during
1936-1938 (as well other massacres against Alevis in Çorum, Maraş, Sivas later
on) remained another firmly denied subject of the Republican history. This
paper will compare the changes and continuities not only in the politics of
denial with regard to these three cases, but also will compare the forms of
contestations against the politics of denial. All of these three former taboo
subjects constitute at present the most hotly debated issues in Turkey spurred
by various reconciliation efforts and discourses, yet a comparative look is
rather absent. As a result of the compartmentalization by the official
discourse that has reframed state violence as Armenian, Kurdish and Alevi
"questions', this separate and isolated treatment is still mirrored in
scholarship and public debate. To counter this compartmentalization, this paper
takes a
comprehensive look at contemporary reconciliation
discourses in Turkey to carve out patterns and frames within the official
discourse and public debate vis-a-vis the former taboo subjects. It argues that
despite the unprecedented amount of engagement and discussion of state crimes,
the treatment of minorities and memory/identity politics in Turkey, a
persistence of denialist frames -albeit in modified forms- still poses the
limits of discussion.
“Commemoration and Denial: Holocaust and Armenian
Genocide in Public Memory in Turkey”
Dr. Corry Guttstadt
In the last few years the Holocaust is present in Turkish
politics and public: Some Turkish officials join the international Holocaust
Remembrance Day celebrations at January 27, the Turkish government considers
implementing Holocaust education in the school curricula and the Turkish
Ambassador to Germany held a mourning ceremony at the memorial site of the
former concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where a memorial plaque for the
Turkish Jewish victims was unveiled. Holocaust related topics also appear in
some novels recently published in Turkey. On the one hand it might be
astonishing that Turkey “discovers” the Holocaust only now: Until recently the
Holocaust was a non –topic in Turkey, no Turkish academic conducted any
research on the topic. Although several thousand Jews from Turkey were deported
and murdered by the Nazis, Turkish government agencies to this day did not take
the trouble to compile the names of the victims. Not a single memorial book
about them exists. It is noteworthy that most of the activities of Turkish
officials regarding the Holocaust are closely linked to the denial of the
Armenian genocide. Any mention of the Holocaust triggers an almost reflexive
negative association with the Armenian genocide. My paper analyses the
connection / correlation of Turkish reactions to both the Holocaust and the
Armenian Genocide. I will discuss recent comments and publications by Turkish
officials and opinion makers in Turkey, but I will also examine some literary
publications (novels, short stories) recently published on the topic.
“Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism: Neo-Ottomanism,
Humanism, Branding the Nation and Civilization in Contemporary Turkey”
Assistant Professor Aslı Iğsız
In 2005, the United Nations launched the Alliance of
Civilizations initiative, cosponsored by the Spanish and Turkish governments,
to address issues raised by “Clash of Civilizations” discourses in the
aftermath of 9/11. In 2006, a series of “rebranding” initiatives were launched
during the World Economic Forum meetings to repair the image of the Middle East
and to propose Turkey as a “bridge between civilizations.” In this process,
certain categories (e.g. civilization and the East/West) have informed the
terms of relevance in these projects. It is at this juncture in 2006 that the
European Union selected Istanbul as a 2010 European Capital of Culture. One of
the most important selection criteria was “diversity” and all cities selected
as the 2010 European Capital of Culture had highlighted their “multicultural”
character. In surface, all these initiatives appear to endorse the “celebration
of diversity.” Yet, how inclusive are these transnational initiatives and the local
multiculturalism policies they inform? What are the broader implications of
these dynamics for alterity? This paper will address the limits of liberal
multiculturalism in general, with Turkey as a particular instance.
“Re-Making Life between the Weight of the Past and Void
of Future: Ethnographic Explorations on Daily Encounters between the Cow,
Villager and Returnee in a Ghost Village of Midyat, Turkey”
Dr. Zerrin Özlem Biner
This paper explores the political and affective meanings
of the practices of returning home from the perspective of Syriac Christians
who left their villages as a result of different cycles of violence that
involve 1915 Armenian Genocide, 1925 Kurdish uprisings, and 1990’s military
conflict between the Turkish armed forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK). Drawing on the ethnographic research in a Syriac-Kurdish village, the
paper analyses the relationships between the Kurdish settlers and Syriac
Christian returnees who struggle to re-claim their property and re-vitalise life
in the ruined village. The daily struggle for return involves tackling both
with the legal and bureaucratic procedures of the state and economic and
political rules of the feudal order. More significantly, it involves the effort
to create new forms of relationships between the Syriac returnees and Kurdish
villagers who remained in the territory as the perpetrator, witness, survivor
or the occupier. This paper is concerned with the analysis of the meaning of
the new encounters that take place in-between the fractured imaginations of the
past atrocities, pragmatism of everyday survival and hope for the possibility
of re-possessing home. “Moral Domains of Return” Dr. Ceren Özgül
"When I decided to convert back, my father and
brothers told me what I am doing is ayıp (it's a shame)…. Ayıp, they told me,
as if I am dishonouring them, or our family's name. Ayıp!" This account of
his family’s reaction by a return convert to Armenianness introduces ayıp as a
category that conveys the conflictive moral domains produced around return
conversions. In different stages of my research on Armenian return conversions
in Turkey, I encountered this powerful word repetitively. Ayıp is materialized
around several issues regarding return conversions: Some converts relayed me
that they were accused of being pragmatists, or even worst, impostors who were
not after reclaiming their Armenian identity but were expecting material gain.
They also recognized an appeal to ayıp from members of the established Armenian
community in Istanbul, as they were warned not to succumb into the so-called
“Armenian diaspora’s propaganda”; that is to pressure the Turkish state to
accept the events of 1915 as genocide. Armenian return converts’ repetitive
return to accusations of moral inferiority and infliction of shame to their
families in their conversion narratives constitutes a similar “obsession” to
what Vincent Crapanzano calls as “dwelling obsessively on a tangential but
consequential event" (2011, 73). This paper argues that this obsession with
ayıp assumes extraordinary centrality for their experiences of exclusion and
loss. Specifically, it discusses ayıp as a term around which the decision to
convert is made, discussed, and assessed by the converts themselves. Through
the prism of ayıp, these return conversions not only appear to be a (a)moral
decision that harms a person's reputation as well as his/her family's honour,
but also conveys a sense of loss as a result of their consequential exclusion
by their families, previous religious communities, and neighbourhoods through
this moral category.
“Debt of the Dead: Hunting for Treasures in what was Once
Also Western Armenia”
Dr. Alice von Bieberstein
Hunting for treasures in Eastern Turkey/Northern
Kurdistan/Western Armenia is an officially
criminalized yet tacitly tolerated passion pursued almost
exclusively by men who spend fortunes on the acquisition of tools and expert
knowledge in the hope of finding what is also commonly referred to as 'Armenian
gold'. Besides the libidinal pleasures of transgression and digging - mostly in
the dark of the night, treasure-hunters are enthralled by the jewellery,
statues, coins and other objects that emerge from the ground and are bathed in
an aura of singularity and historicity. This presentation follows the question
of how the practice of treasure-hunting and the engagement with sought-our or
found objects articulates a relation - or not - to the Armenian past of the
region and the disappearance of its Armenian population during the 1915
genocide. While the emergence of objects from the ground might prompt both
experiences of loss as well as questions of how to relate to the origin and
makers of these objects, fuelled by a broader nostalgic discourse on the lost
skilful craftsmanship of Armenian artisans, this 'Armenian' past remains a
generic, irretrievably lost time while the objects are submitted to an
essentially future-oriented reading, pointing to ever more potential riches.
The force of loss, though, returns in the form of the state, in whose hands
most treasures eventually land, and in moralised tales of the gold's
essentially destructive force, cursing finders through illness, death and
poverty.
“Spaces of Education, States of Ruination and Survival”
Associate Professor Ayşe Parla
Taking my cue from the recent interest in 'ruins' as
indexing both physical and social states of ruination, this talk will examine
the historical and contemporary links between, on the one hand, physically
abandoned buildings in Istanbul that were once Armenian minority schools, and on
the other hand, the different states of social abandonment undocumented
Armenian migrant children find themselves in despite their limited and largely
informal access to minority schools. My focus on ruins as embodied states
rather than simply remnants also seeks to explore how the denial of genocide
induces melancholy and impedes mourning in the national education system to
which Armenian children in Turkey both without and with formal citizenship are
exposed.
“Narratives of Survival: Gender, Memory and the Armenian
Genocide”
Dr. Ayşe Gül Altınay The presentation will review the
ways in which “survival” is portrayed in recent memory and historical works
regarding the Armenian genocide. Special attention will be given to narratives
on women and Islamized Armenian survivors.
“Landscapes of Memory and Forgetting: Facing the Armenian
Genocide in 2015”
Dr. Sossie Kasbarian
This co-authored paper (with Kerem Oktem) seeks to
understand the emergence of a new landscape of memory and forgetting by
analysing acts of remembering and denial among civil society and state actors
based in Turkey, Armenia and in diaspora. This landscape is characterized by a
new sets of actor alliances that extend beyond the politically constructed
borders between Turks and Armenians, and by new locales of memory, many of
which, surprisingly, are located in Turkey. The paper will hence seek to map
this landscape and search for the societal and political tensions and conflicts
this new landscape is causing for the different sets of actors. This work is
part of a larger project which analyses the centenary, and its wider
implications for Armenian and Turkish histories, culture, politics and society.
The paper will be based on a survey of the key events marking 2015 in Turkey,
Armenia and
among the Armenian diaspora based in Europe. The focus
will be on the commemoration events in Turkey, where conflicts between and
among actors are expected to become most visible.
“Cutting Manhood: A Phallic Genealogy for the Turkish
State Sovereignty across Two Fin-de-siècles”
Dr. Serap Ruken Şengül
Gendered analysis of the Armenian and Kurdish issues is
characterized by a tendency of equating gender with “woman” or the universally
feminized category of “women-children”. This work explores male-gendered topographies
of these histories of violence by tracing the politics of circumcision that
have involved in their making since the late nineteenth century. Male
circumcision is a formidably polysemic practice that seals group boundaries and
hierarchies in the materiality of the body according to ever-shifting sets of
outsiders across time-space. In the historical Ottoman East, the practice was
observed by Muslims, Jews and heterodox communities as simultaneously a
religious prescription and a gender initiatory ritual. With the late 19th
century context of anti-Armenian antagonism “being uncircumcised” gained a
meaning in-itself as sign of an irreducible Muslim-Christian alterity. During
the Hamidian era Armenian men encountered circumcision as one distinguished threshold
of their relation to life and death over the course of pogroms and mass
conversions. Circumcision gained a novel nationalizing function under the reign
of the secular Ittihadists: While invalidating Armenian conversions to Islam,
the Ittihadists also pursued a systematic policy of circumcising Armenian and
Kurdish male orphans of the Genocide and World War I as means to inscribe the
mark of the Turkish father on their bodies following the murder of their
non-Turkish fathers. Non-Turkish men’s ordeal with circumcision continues in
Turkey in circulations of the sexist and racializing trope of “the
uncircumcised terrorist,” coined by the Turkish state toward the legitimate
murder or symbolic castration of male Kurdish rebels for the past three decades.
By tracing the shifting political semantics of circumcision across these
thresholds, I aim to contribute not only to the critical feminist scholarship
on modern Turkish identity and sovereignty, but also to the understandings of
the affiliative genealogies between the Armenian and Kurdish issues from a yet
unexplored terrain.
“Bûka Baranê (Bride of the Rain): A Documentary about the
90’s Truth Telling in Divided Societies”
Murat Çelikkan
Bûka Baranê literally means the bride of the rain the
name given to a rainbow in Kurdish. This documentary intends to tell the story
of children who grew up in a village in the Kurdistan region of Turkey, during
the 90’s and during the war between the Kurdistan Workers Party guerrillas and
the state security forces. Hafıza Merkezi made more than 40 screenings for the
documentary all over Turkey, intriguing and sometimes contentious reactions.
The audience's political position about war and the peace process also
dominated their perception of truth as transmitted through the documentary.
This paper will deal with the impact of truth telling (a documentary in this is
case) in a highly opinionated and politicized society. “Yüzleşme from a
Psycho-Political Perspective”
Dr. Murat Paker
Yüzleşme in Turkish does not have a perfect English
translation, but can be translated as
“coming to terms with,” or “facing up to,” or
“confrontation.” It originally means “two persons coming face-to-face to
uncover truth.” In recent years, yüzleşme has become one of the common terms
used in Turkish political life and has become a familiar concept. This article
aims to discuss the following different dimensions of yüzleşme in the context
of Turkey. Goals of yüzleşme: 1) to establish the truth; 2) to create a new
relational space between the parties which claim conflicting versions of the
truth; 3) to reach reconciliation. Layers of yüzleşme: From the Other to
Ourselves, at least five different layers could be identified. Spheres of
yüzleşme: Truth and justice seeking a) on the individual sphere through
individual interactions (including psychoanalysis / psychotherapy) vs. on the
socio-political sphere through retributive and/or restorative justice.
Elements-Stages of yüzleşme: 1) Trust and security; 2) Equivalence &
equality; 3) Knowledge and Memory: Uncovering the truth; 4) Affect; 5) Meaning;
6) Apology and demand for forgiveness; 7) Restitution; 8) Reparation; 9)
Redefinition of rights-Legal reforms; 10) Social Justice. Unofficial vs.
official yüzleşme: An unofficial yüzleşme process has started in Turkey, but
there is also a need for a more structural and systematic official yüzleşme
process which is a matter of political struggle and transformation. Where
should we start? As a general principle it can be said that the process should
start with dark pages that have the highest degree of actuality and bitterness;
hence with the greater potential of touching the daily lives of the citizens.
For Turkey, this issue is indubitably the Turkish-Kurdish issue.
Democratization vs. yüzleşme. Which is primary? Both. These two processes feed
each other and are inevitably interlinked.
“Encountering the Past in Turkey: A Personal Reflection
on Two Decades of Research and Experience”
Professor Leyla Neyzi
What happened in/to Turkey in recent years? Certainly, in
my own experience of conducting research on memory for more than two decades,
there has been a sea change. From a loud silence combined with resistance and
quiet fragments to a virtual flood…In this paper, I would like to reflect on
this phenomenon at two levels, not easy to differentiate: the personal and the
collective. At the personal level, when I first began to compile an oral
history archive in the late 1980s and 1990s, my sense was that individuals
wished to speak but were curtailed by fear and the lack of a context within
which to frame their stories. In the effort, the discovery of extremely painful
experiences and events was a shock I too had to contend with. At the collective
level, bottom-up organization and demands for rights and accountability vis-à-vis
the past (and the not-so-past) was beginning to emerge. Today, on the other
hand, the loneliness or aloneness and personal confrontations are replaced by a
slew of public subjectivities heaving to and fro due to conflictual encounters
in narrative and performance—not to mention in everyday life. The demand from
below has created new structures and organizations, though with yet limited
effect in terms of accountability and rights. My reflections will conclude with
expectations about the consequences of a process that is still under way.
“Encountering National Histories, Encountering Global
Histories: Turkey, Armenia and the First World War Centenary”
Dr. Joanne Laycock
This paper addresses the significance and implications of
the commemoration of the centenaries of the First World War and Armenian
Genocide for understandings of war, violence, displacement and their aftermaths
in the Ottoman/Russian borderlands. Whilst the First World War centenary has
focused both popular and scholarly attention on this period of
conflict, I suggest that the media coverage and
commemorative events in Britain have reinforced popular understandings of the
war which are both geographically narrow and framed in terms of the history of
particular nation states. Last year this issue was highlighted by a British
council report which argued for the importance of broadening current
understandings and emphasized the need to ‘remember the world as well as the
war. The forthcoming centenary of the Armenian genocide, meanwhile, has attracted
increasing amounts of attention, both in the media and in academic circles.
This development offers the potential to contest and broaden current popular
understandings of the First World War. Yet thus far, the story of conflict,
violence and displacement in this complex region has also been portrayed in
‘national’ terms as histories of Armenia and Turkey. Whilst understanding the
evolution of contested Turkish/Armenian narratives is essential for
understanding both the construction of contemporary Armenian and Turkish
identities, the reiteration of these ‘national narratives’ is problematic,
masking the complexities of the period and reinforcing reductive notions of the
First World War as a straightforward ‘national’ conflict. In this paper therefore
I examine the possibilities and challenges of developing transnational
histories of these events and their potential for developing a richer and more
complex public understanding not only of the fate of the Ottoman Armenians but
of the First World War more broadly.
Speaker Biographies:
Ayşe Gül Altınay, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
Sabancı University, İstanbul
Dr. Ayşe Gül Altınay received her Ph.D. in Cultural
Anthropology from Duke University and has been teaching at Sabancı University
since 2001. Her research and writing have focused on militarism, nationalism,
violence, memory, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of The Myth of the
Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender and Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004);
co-author of Violence Against Women in Turkey: A Nationwide Survey (with Yeşim
Arat, Punto, 2009, www.kadinayoneliksiddet.org/English.html), işte böyle
güzelim... (based on women’s narratives of sexualities, with Hülya Adak, Esin
Düzel and Nilgün Bayraktar, Sel, 2008, www.isteboyleguzelim.org), and Torunlar
(based on Muslim grandchildren’s narratives of their converted Armenian
grandparents, with Fethiye Çetin, Metis, 2009, second edition 2010; French
translation: Les Petits-enfants, trans. Célin Vuraler, Arles: Actes Sud, 2011;
Armenian translation: Torner, trans. Lilit Gasparyan and Tigran Mets
Hratarakchatun, Yerevan: Targqnutyun, 2011; English translation: Grandchildren,
trans.Maureen Freely, Transaction Publishers, forthcoming); and editor of
Vatan, Millet, Kadınlar (Iletişim, 2000, second edition 2004) and Ebru:
Reflections on Cultural Diversity in Turkey, a photography project by Attila
Durak (Metis, 2007, www.ebruproject.com). Her co-authored book with Yeşim Arat,
Türkiye’de Kadına Yönelik Şiddet (Violence Against Women in Turkey) was awarded
the 2008 PEN Duygu Asena Award. Dr. Bilgin Ayata, Department of Political
Science, Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy, Freie
Universität Berlin Dr. Bilgin Ayata is Lecturer at the Center for Transnational
Relations, Foreign-and Security Policy in the Department of Political Science
at Freie University Berlin, where she teaches International Relations. Her
research interests are migration, conflict, social movements, memory and
postcolonial theory. She has published on internal displacement, transnational
protest movements, Armenian- Kurdish relations and the politics of denial in
Turkey. After receiving her MA from York University in Toronto, she obtained
her PhD in Political Science
in 2011 from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore and has
held postdoctoral fellowships at FU Berlin. Since 2006, she is a participant
observer, critic and contributor to the reconciliation discourses in Turkey,
both with regard to the Armenian Genocide as well as the Kurdish conflict.
Dr. Alice von Bieberstein, Graduate Student, Department
of Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Dr. Alice von Bieberstein completed her PhD in Social
Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2012. In her dissertation she
explored the making and re-making of (mostly Armenian/minority) subjectivity in
relation to the politics of history and citizenship in Turkey and Germany.
Currently, she is postdoctoral research associate at the University of
Cambridge on an ERC-funded project entitled 'Remnants', researching material
traces of past and present formations of violence, as well as their engagements
and transformations, in Moush, Eastern Anatolia.
Zerrin Özlem Biner, Research Associate, Division of
Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Dr. Zerrin Özlem Biner is a Research Associate at the
Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. She received her
Ph.D. from University of Cambridge in 2007. Dr. Biner is an anthropologist with
research interests in the ethnography of the state, history, violence and
memory, minorities and diasporic communities, cultural heritage and
materiality, and reconciliation. Her research engages with the material,
cultural and psychic effects of political violence in Turkey. She is currently
in the final stages of drafting her first book manuscript and is also working
on a co-authored book on the material and immaterial remnants of past violence
in Turkey.
Murat Çelikkan, Co-Director of Truth Justice Memory
Center in İstanbul
Mr. Murat Çelikkan has been working as a journalist for
the past 25 years in various positions such as reporter, editor, columnist and
chief executive editor. Mr. Çelikkan has been an active member of the Turkish
Human Rights Movement. He was a founding member and has been on the boards of
the Human Rights Association, Helsinki Citizens Assembly, Amnesty International
and Human Rights Foundation. He has worked on projects related to the Kurdish
problem and media ethics, freedom of speech and assembly. Mr. Çelikkan is a
graduate of Middle East Technical University. He is currently the Co-Director
of Truth Justice Memory Center in İstanbul. (www. hakikatadalethafiza.org) He
is also the producer of two feature films and the documentary Bûka Baranê.
Ayda Erbal, PhD Candidate and Adjunct Professor, Department
of Politics, New York University
Ayda Erbal teaches Middle Eastern Politics, and
Democratic Theory, as adjunct professor of politics at New York University,
Department of Politics. She is interested in democratic theory, the politics of
"post-nationalist" historiographies in transitional settings, the
political-economy of mass violence and state formation, the politics of apology
and the politics of dignity. A chapter of her dissertation, Mea Culpas,
Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the Turkish Intellectuals'
"Apology" Campaign is published in Reconciliation, Civil Society, and
the Politics of Memory (ed. Birgit Schwelling). An award winning filmmaker on
the side, Erbal is in the process of writing her second narrative short
"Meligone". Erbal is also a
published short-story writer and one of the founding
editors of Azad Alik (http://azadalik.wordpress.com), a multilingual politics
blog primarily dealing with minority issues in Turkey. Erbal also occasionally
contributes to newspapers and magazines in Turkey, France and the United
States. Erbal's report on Turkey's Draft Constitution's Article 1st on Human
Dignity, We the Dignified People of Turkey, got published by TESEV in February
2015.
Fatma Müge Göçek, Professor of Sociology and Women's
Studies, University of Michigan
Fatma Müge Göçek is a Professor of Sociology and Women's
Studies. Her research focuses on the comparative analysis of history, politics
and gender in the first and third worlds. She critically analyzes the impact of
processes such as development, nationalism, religious movements and collective
violence on minorities. Her published works includes East Encounters West:
France and the Ottoman Empire in the 18th Century (Oxford University Press,
1987), Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity, Power
(Columbia University Press, 1994 co-edited with Shiva Balaghi), Rise of the
Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (Oxford
University Press, 1996), Political Cartoons in the Middle East (Markus Wiener
Publishers, 1998), Social Constructions of Nationalism in the Middle East (SUNY
Press, 2002), The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from
the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era (I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2011), and A
Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire
(Oxford University Press, 2011 co-edited with Ronald Grigor Suny and Norman
Naimark).
Dr. Corry Guttstadt, Lecturer for Turkish Studies,
Hamburg University, Germany
Dr. Corry Guttstadt received her masters in Turkology and
History from Hamburg University and her Ph.D. in History form the same
University. During the 1980s and 1990, she worked as a translator/interpreter
for Turkish and as a journalist on Turkey. She is teaching at Hamburg
University (Department of Turkology). During 2011/2012, she was a Project
manager at the Anne-Frank-Zentrum at Berlin. Her Ph.D. Turkey the Jews and the
Holocaust is based on research in about fifty archives worldwide. It was first
published in Germany in 2008 (Die Türkei die Juden und der Holocaust,
Assoziation A, 2008) in Turkey in 2012 (İletişim) and in English with Cambridge
University Press (May 2013). Her main fields of research are Turkey’s minority
policies, especially towards Jews and anti-Semitism in Turkey. Numerous
publications and articles on topics like minorities and human rights in Turkey,
anti-Semitism, Kurdish People, Armenians, nationalism, migration etc. Her last
publication is: Wege ohne Heimkehr an Anthology of Armenian reports of Deported
and Survivors in Literature and Memories (Assoziation A, 2014). She is
currently a research-fellow at Yad Vashem, working on a document edition on
Turkey and its politics during the Holocaust to be published with the
Beate-and-Serge-Klarsfeld-Foundation and on a collection of life stories of
Turkish Jews in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s (to be published in Turkey as
“Hayat Yolları – Ölüm Yolları).
Aslı Iğsız, Assistant Professor of Culture and
Representation, Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York
University
Dr. Aslı Iğsız is Assistant Professor of Culture and
Representation, Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, at New York
University. Her teaching and research interests include cultural representation
and cultural history, narratives of war and displacement, and
dynamics of alterity in the late Ottoman and contemporary
Turkish contexts. Her publications span a variety of issues that include the
politics of memory; nation branding, alliance of civilizations and image wars;
law, neoliberalism, and the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey. Her current book
project, Humanism in Ruins: Liberal Multiculturalism, Memory and the 1923
Greek-Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey, examines the
implications of “liberal multiculturalism” and cultural memory as a mode of
humanism in the post-Cold War and post 1980 military-coup era Turkey.
Sossie Kasbarian, Lecturer in Middle East Politics,
University of Lancaster
Dr. Sossie Kasbarian was awarded her PhD from the School
of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2007. She was a
Visiting Lecturer at the Graduate Institute of International and Development
Studies in Geneva 2007-2010, and a Teaching Fellow at SOAS. She was a
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab
World (CASAW) at the University of Edinburgh in 2011. Since January 2012 she is
Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Lancaster. Sossie is
co-editor of the book Contextualizing Community – Diasporas of the Middle East
(with Anthony Gorman, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2015). She is
also co-editor (with Kerem Öktem) of the special issue of the journal Patterns
of Prejudice entitled Armenians, Turks and Kurds Beyond Denial (Vol. 48, May
2014), as well as author of several articles relating to the Middle East and
Diaspora Studies.
Joanne Laycock, Senior Lecturer in Modern History,
Sheffield Hallam University
Dr. Joanne Laycock is currently Senior Lecturer in
History at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research addresses the history of
Armenia from a transnational perspective, focusing on the aftermaths of
conflict, disaster and displacement and the responses that they engender. Her
monograph Imagining Armenia, was published by Manchester University Press in
2009 and addressed British representations of Armenia and the ways in which
they conditioned responses to the Armenian genocide. She has also published on
the post-1995 repatriations of Armenians to the Soviet Union. Her current
research project addresses the entwined local and international responses to
displacement in early Soviet Armenia and the South Caucasus and their
relationship to the construction of Soviet society. With Dr. Sossie Kasbarian,
she is also involved in the development of a research network on
Armenian/Turkish studies and am particularly interested in the memory of
genocide and its aftermaths in Soviet Armenia and the contemporary Republic of
Armenia.
Leyla Neyzi, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı
University, İstanbul
Professor Leyla Neyzi is an anthropologist and oral
historian, and is based at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı
University in Istanbul. Her research areas include oral history, memory
studies, transnational youth subjectivities, nationalism and minorities. Most
recently, she completed an oral history project on Kurdish and Turkish youth in
Turkey and Germany. Her publications and projects can be viewed on her website:
http://myweb.sabanciuniv.edu/neyzi/
Marc Nichanian, Visiting Professor, Sabancı University,
İstanbul
Professor Marc Nichanian was Professor of Armenian
Studies at Columbia University, New York, until 2007, and is now teaching
occasionally as a visiting professor at Sabancı University, İstanbul, in the
Program of Cultural Studies. He is the author of Entre l'art et le témoignage
(three volumes, MétisPresse, 2006-2008), and Edebiyat ve Felaket (Literature
and Catastrophe), the Turkish translation of a series of public lectures in
Istanbul (Iletişim, 2011).
His most recent publications are Mourning Philology
(Fordham University Press, 2014), and the Armenian translation of three novels
by Maurice Blanchot (Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, The Last Man, éd.
Inknagir, Yerevan, 2013). Forthcoming in French: Le Sujet de l'histoire. Vers
une phénoménologie du survivant (Paris: Lignes).
Ceren Özgül, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor
Dr. Ceren Özgül is a legal anthropologist. Having just
completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Armenian Studies and Anthropology at
Michigan University, Ann Arbor, she is currently a postdoctoral research fellow
at the European Research Council and ELIAMEP conducting research on the
European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) religious freedom jurisprudence. Her
article "Legally Armenian: Tolerance, Conversion, and Name Change in
Turkish Courts" was published in Comparative Studies in Society and
History in 2014, and draws on her dissertation research on the return
conversions of forcibly Islamized Armenians during the genocide of 1915. Her
current research analyzes how religious minorities, political agency, legal
responsibility, and conditions of belief are produced through the legal and
cultural codification of religious tolerance in Turkey. As the 2014 recipient
of the Wenner-Gren's Hunt Fellowship, she is currently revising her book
manuscript entitled "The Return: Armenian Conversions, Secularism, and Law
in Turkey" for publication.
Murat Paker, Department of Psychology, İstanbul Bilgi
University
Murat Paker graduated from İstanbul University, School of
Medicine in 1985 and worked as a physician for seven years while also
completing his MA in clinical psychology at Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. He
went to New York in 1992 to do his PhD in clinical psychology at the New School
for Social Research. He completed his PhD and post-doc work in 2000. Till 2005,
he worked as a psychotherapist and clinical director at Safe Horizon / New
York, a large NGO which provides psycho-social support to trauma (including
war-torture) survivors. He relocated back to İstanbul in 2005 and founded the
graduate program in clinical psychology at İstanbul Bilgi University.
Currently, he is a full time faculty at the Psychology Department of the same
university; is the director the graduate; teaches clinical graduate courses;
and provides clinical supervision. He also runs a part-time private
psychotherapy practice. He is the founding-general-editor of the book series,
Psychoanalysis/Psychology, of the İstanbul Bilgi University Press. His main
interest areas are psychoanalysis, psychotraumatology, psychotherapy, and their
intersection with politics. Dr. Paker has published extensively on the
psychology of torture survivors, psychotraumatlogy, trauma therapy, human
rights, and psycho-politics. His book titled Psiko-politik Yüzleşmeler[Psycho-political
Confrontations] was published in 2007. Since 2008, he has been an active member
of 1980-84 Diyarbakır Prison Truth and Justice Commission, Turkey’s first and
only, unofficial, truth commission. Dr. Paker writes a column for T24, a
web-based newspaper in Turkish.
Ayşe Parla, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Sabancı
University, İstanbul
Ayşe Parla is currently Associate Professor of
Anthropology in the programs in Cultural Studies and European Studies at
Sabanci University, Istanbul. She received her B.A. from Harvard University in
1995 and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from New York University in 2005. She has
researched state authorized virginity examinations in Turkey as modern forms of
surveillance of young women’s honour; the appropriation of Bulgarian Turkish
migrants as “ethnic kin” in 1989; their subsequent marginalization as part of
the precarious informal labour force post 1990; and is currently working on
undocumented migrant children in Turkey
and access to education. She has published her work in
various journals including: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, American
Ethnologist, Citizenship Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Differences,
Ethnography, and International Migration. As the recipient of the Turkish Academy
of Sciences Exceptional Young Scholar Award as well as a research fellowship
from the Peter Wall Advanced Institute of Study at the University of British
Columbia, Parla’s current research locates Armenian migrant children's access
to education in Turkey within a broader historical perspective that goes beyond
the migrant/citizen dichotomy by examining the ways the education of Armenian
citizens are also regulated through states of exception in a post-genocidal
society.
Max Silverman, Professor of French, School of Languages,
Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds
Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at
the University of Leeds. His most recent work is on post-Holocaust culture,
colonial and postcolonial theory and cultures, and questions of memory, race
and violence. He has recently published a book on connections between the
Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary
entitled Palimpsestic Memory: the Holocaust and Colonialism in French and
Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013). His co-edited book with Griselda
Pollock Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain
Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’ was published in 2011 (Berghahn) and a second
co-edited volume with Griselda Pollock entitled Concentrationary Memories:
Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance was published by I. B. Tauris in
2014.
Serap Ruken Şengül, Manoogian Post-Doctoral Fellow,
Armenian Studies Programme, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Serap Ruken Şengül received her PhD in Anthropology from
the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, She is a Manoogian Postdoctoral
Fellow at the University of Michigan working on a monograph that undertakes a
gender analysis of formations of sovereignty, identity, violence, and memory
that have been implicated in the turning of the Late Ottoman frontier province
of Kurdistan into Turkey’s "East" since the late nineteenth century.
Moderator Biographies:
Marc David Baer, Professor of International History,
Department of International History, LSE
Marc David Baer is Professor of International History at
the Department of International History at LSE. Professor Baer earned his BA
degree at Northwestern University and his PhD at the University of Chicago.
Before joining LSE in 2013, Baer taught at Tulane University, New Orleans, and
the University of California, Irvine. His research interests are His research
interests are His research interests are His research interests are His
research interests are His research interests are His research interests are
His research interests are His research interests are His research interests
are His research interests are His research interests are His research interests
are His research interests are His research interests are His research
interests are His research interests are His research interests are His
research interests are His research interests are His research interests are
Early Modern and Modern Europe and Middle East, Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and
Germany. Professor Baer’s research focuses on the connected histories of
Christians, Jews, and Muslims in European and Middle Eastern history, from the
early modern era to the modern. He published extensively on his research areas.
His first book is Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in
Ottoman Europe (Oxford, 2008, Turkish translation, IV.
Mehmet Döneminde Osmanlı Avrupasında İhtida ve Fetih,
Hil, 2010). His most recent academic article is “Muslim Encounters with Nazism
and the Holocaust: The Ahmadi of Berlin and Jewish Convert to Islam Hugo
Marcus." The American Historical Review Vol. 120, No. 1 (February 2015):
140-171.
Armine Ishkanian, Assistant Professor, Department of
Social Policy, LSE
Armine Ishkanian is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics. Her research examines
the relationship between civil society and social transformation as well as how
civil society organisations and social movements engage in policy processes.
Her main research interests include civil society, citizenship, democracy,
gender, inequality, and poverty. She is the author of numerous academic
articles and two books: Democracy Building and Civil Society in Armenia (2008)
and The Big Society Debate: A New Agenda for Social Welfare? [co-edited with
Simon Szreter] (2012). Her most recent publications include, “Surreptitious
Symbiosis: Engagement between activists and NGOs” co-written with Marlies
Glasius in Voluntas 2015; ; “Neoliberalism and Violence: the Big Society and
the changing politics of domestic violence in England” in Critical Social
Policy (2014); and “Engineered Civil Society: the impact of 20 years of
democracy promotion on civil society development in the former Soviet
countries” in Democracy Promotion and Civil Society in Post-Socialist Europe
(2014).
Esra Özyürek, Associate Professor, Chair for Contemporary
Turkish Studies, European Institute, LSE
Esra Özyürek is an Associate Professor, and Chair for
Contemporary Turkish Studies Programme at the European Institute at LSE. She
received her BA in Sociology and Political Science at Boğaziçi University,
İstanbul and her MA and PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor. Before joining the LSE, she taught at the Anthropology Department of
University of California, San Diego. Her research interests are secularism,
Islam, Christianity, nationalism, religious conversion, memory, Turkey, and
Germany. Dr. Özyürek is a political anthropologist who seeks to understand how
Islam, Christianity, secularism, and nationalism are dynamically positioned in
relation to each other in Turkey and in Europe. For her research received
funding from Fulbright Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, German
Academic Exchange, Institute for Turkish Studies. She was a resident fellow at
the American Academy in Berlin. She is the recipient of Barkan Prize for best
article in the field of Turkish Studies. Her most recent book Being German,
Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion and Conversion in the New Europe has been
published by the Princeton University Press (2014). Her previous book Nostalgia
for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey has been
published by Duke University Press (2007). She also is the editor of Politics
of Public Memory in Turkey published by Syracuse University Press (2007) and
Unuttuklarɩ ve Hatɩrladɩklarɩyla Türkiye’nin Toplumsal Hafɩzasɩ by İletişim Yayɩnevi
(2002).
Hakan Seçkinelgin, Associate Professor in International
Social Policy, Department of Social Policy, LSE and Visiting Research Fellow,
CERI, SciencePo, Paris. Hakan Seçkinelgin is Associate Professor in
International Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy at LSE and
Visiting Research Fellow at CERI at SciencePo in Paris. He was trained in
political theory and international relations at the LSE. His work has
consciously links theory and empirical research to unpack ways of thinking that
impact action. He is interested in the continental philosophy around Descartes,
Kant, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Arent
and Rancière. He has number of interrelated
multidisciplinary research interests. One of his research fields since the late
1990s has been in the international HIV/AIDS field. He has worked on the
relationship between international AIDS policy frameworks and people’s
experiences of the disease in Sub-Saharan Africa particularly in Rwanda,
Zambia, Lesotho, South Sudan and Uganda. His last book was based on a research
in Burundi after the civil war looking at the intersections of gender, violence
and vulnerability to HIV. Another area of interest has been on theories of
civil society and non-governmental organizations. He was an editor of Global
Civil Society Yearbook and at present is the editor in Chief of the Journal of
Civil Society. The public debates and related understandings of the Armenian
genocide in Turkey has been a long standing research interest since 1990s. At
present he is working on a project entitled Memories that do not remember: The
implications of forgetting 1915 in Turkey.
ENCOUNTERING THE PAST IN TURKEY 11-12-13 May 2015, London
School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
In the past ten years something unexpected, but long
overdue, started to unfold in Turkey. A new interest in history emerged in a
country that had erased its Ottoman past. More surprising, the most traumatic
aspects of Turkish history, especially those that were considered taboo, or
simply denied until recently, became issues of public debate. Even though still
a minority, citizens of diverse backgrounds have begun commemorating the
Armenian Genocide, the Dersim and Maraş massacres, the Wealth Tax, and expulsions
of Greeks. At the face of an official policy of denial, increasing number of
activists, artists, scholars, and citizens demand a deeper understanding and
recognition of past atrocities in order to atone and seek justice.
This 3-days conference explores how, why, under what
conditions, and among which groups did willingness to confront the Armenian
Genocide and other violent episodes Turkish history came into being. What kinds
of strategies are used by different groups to promote coming to terms with the
past as well as avoiding it? What transformative power can we expect from this
numerically limited but strongly articulated movement? What are the
implications of encountering the past for contemporary dynamics in Turkey? By
doing so, it is hoped that the conference will contribute to promoting acts of
reconciliation that have begun in Turkey.
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
________________
Monday, 11 May 2015
Venue: Room STC. S75, Ground Floor, St. Clements
Building, LSE ___________________________________________________________________________
18:00 – 20:00 Opening Panel
Paper Titles and Speakers “Violence, Survival,
Sovereignty”
Marc Nichanian, Visiting Professor, Sabancı University,
İstanbul
“The Impact of Refusal to Encounter the Past on Turkish
State and Society”
Fatma Müge Göçek, Professor of Sociology and Women's
Studies, University of Michigan
“Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in
the Cultural Imaginary” Max Silverman, Professor of French, School of
Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds
Moderator: Esra Özyürek, Associate Professor, Chair for
Contemporary Turkish Studies, European Institute, LSE
________________
Tuesday, 12 May 2015
Venue: Graham Wallace Room, 5th Floor, Old Building, LSE
___________________________________________________________________________
10:00 – 12:30 Panel I
Paper Titles and Speakers “Lost in Translation: The
Monument’s Demolishing”
Ayda Erbal, Adjunct Professor and PhD Candidate,
Department of Politics, New York University “Change and Continuity in the
Politics of Denial: A Comparative Look at Reconciliation Discourses in Turkey”
Bilgin Ayata, Department of Political Science, Center for Transnational
Relations, Foreign and Security Policy, Freie Universität Berlin
“Commemoration and Denial: Holocaust and Armenian
Genocide in Public Memory in Turkey”
Corry Guttstadt, Lecturer for Turkish Studies, Hamburg
University, Germany
“Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism: Neo-Ottomanism,
Humanism, Branding the Nation and Civilization in Contemporary Turkey” Aslı
Iğsız, Assistant Professor of Culture and Representation, Department of Middle
Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University Moderator: Marc David Baer,
Professor of International History, Department of International History, LSE
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 16:00 Panel II
Paper Titles and Speakers “Re-Making Life between the
Weight of the Past and Void of Future: Ethnographic Explorations on Daily
Encounters between the Cow, Villager and Returnee in a Ghost Village of Midyat,
Turkey”
Zerrin Özlem Biner, Research Associate, Division of
Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge “Moral Domains of Return” Ceren
Özgül, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
“Debt of the Dead: Hunting for Treasures in what was Once
Also Western Armenia”
Alice von Bieberstein, Postdoctoral Research Associate,
University of Cambridge
Moderator: Hakan Seçkinelgin, Associate Professor,
Department of Social Policy, LSE
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee Break
16:30 – 19:00 Panel III
Paper Titles and Speakers “Spaces of Education, States of
Ruination and Survival” Ayşe Parla, Associate Professor of Anthropology,
Sabancı University, İstanbul “Narratives of Survival: Gender, Memory and the
Armenian Genocide”
Ayşe Gül Altınay, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
Sabancı University, İstanbul “Landscapes of Memory and Forgetting: Facing the
Armenian Genocide in 2015”
Sossie Kasbarian, Lecturer in Middle East Politics,
University of Lancaster
“Cutting Manhood: A Phallic Genealogy for the Turkish
State Sovereignty across Two Fin-de-siècles” Serap Ruken Şengül, Manoogian
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Armenian Studies Programme, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor
Moderator: Esra Özyürek, Associate Professor, Chair for
Contemporary Turkish Studies, European Institute, LSE
________________
Wednesday, 13 May 2015
Venue: Room STC.S221, 2nd Floor, St. Clements Building,
LSE ___________________________________________________________________________
09:30 – 12:00 Panel I
Paper Titles and Speakers “Bûka Baranê (Bride of the
Rain): A Documentary about the 90’s Truth Telling in Divided Societies”
Murat Çelikkan, Co-Director of Truth Justice Memory
Center in İstanbul “Yüzleşme from a Psycho-Political Perspective”
Murat Paker, Department of Psychology, İstanbul Bilgi
University
“Encountering the Past in Turkey: A Personal Reflection
on Two Decades of Research and Experience”
Leyla Neyzi, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı
University, İstanbul
“Encountering National Histories, Encountering Global
Histories: Turkey,
Armenia and the First World War Centenary”
Joanne Laycock, Senior Lecturer in Modern History,
Sheffield Hallam University
Moderator: Armine Ishkanian, Assistant Professor,
Department of Social Policy, LSE
12:00 – 12:30 Coffee Break
12:30 – 13:15 Final Discussion
This event is free and open to all. No ticket is
required.
For further information about the LSE Contemporary
Turkish Studies and its seminars and other activities, please contact:
E-mail: euroinst.turkish.studies@lse.ac.uk or Tel: +44
(020) 7955 6067
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/Research/ContemporaryTurkishStudies/Home.aspx
To find your way to around LSE, please refer to the LSE
map below:
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