Panels and Conferences

KHAS ERC PERFORMANCE AND POLITICS WEBINARS

KHAS ERC PERFORMANCE AND POLITICS WEBINARS

KHAS ERC STAGING-ABJECTION WEBINARS 

Presentation: Theatre to Survive by Jewish Inmates in Terezin/Theresienstadt Concentration Camp and Ghetto
Speaker: Bahar Akpınar
Moderator: Şeyda Nur Yıldırım
Time: Wednesday, November 24, 2021 at 7:30 pm Istanbul (GMT +3)
11:30 am New York
4:30 pm London
5:30 pm Central European


The webinar will be in English.

Please register in advance for this meeting:
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88677142380
Meeting ID: 886 7714 2380
Passcode: 234015

Theatre has long been called a laboratory—for revolution, catharsis, and for formulating our relationship to social action and ethical responsibility. As Tony Kushner once remarked, “theatre is the greatest device we have ever invented for teaching critical consciousness.” By interpreting plays produced during one of the most horrible times in the world’s history, we can discuss how theatre can maintain the power of endurance. This presentation explores the creative coping process of reorganizing the past and projecting the future in the theatre plays secretly written by Jews in Terezin/Theresienstadt during the Holocaust. By exploring the relationship between the time-place designs and memory, Dr. Bahar Akpınar will explain the effect of this structural design on strengthening spiritual resistance. The research turns its face to Poetics by Aristotle to make a comparison with its findings. In this presentation, Dr. Akpınar proposes a new term, “counter-catharsis,” to the field by comparing the findings of psycho-aesthetic design in the Terezin Plays with the rules stated by Aristotle in Poetics. The Terezin Plays are unique and first examples of the counter-catharsis phenomena. However, this concept may bring a new perspective on examining many other works.
 
Bahar Akpınar started her career in corporate life, then she moved on to academic study in the Department of Playwriting and Dramaturgy at Dokuz Eylul University Izmir, Turkey. She completed her master’s degree at the University of Glasgow. While working as an adjunct lecturer in the Performing Arts Department at Dokuz Eylul University, she continued her PhD on theatre plays written by Jewish inmates in the Theresienstadt. She completed her PhD in January 2021. Dr. Akpınar also completed her MA in Holocaust Studies at the Royal Holloway University of London in 2021. In addition to her various academic and artistic awards, her plays were published in the USA and her book on Henrik Ibsen was published in Turkey. She is a writer for Şalom newspaper.

KHAS ERC STAGING-ABJECTION WEBINARS 

Presentation: Linguicide and Kurdish Theater in Turkey: Seeking the Voice
Speaker: Bilal Akar
Moderator: Gamze Tosun
Time: Wednesday, December 22, 2021 at 7:30 pm Istanbul (GMT +3)
11:30 am New York
4:30 pm London
5:30 pm Central European Time


The webinar will be in English.

Please register in advance for this meeting:
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88677142380
Meeting ID: 886 7714 2380
Passcode: 234015

The narrative about the emergence of modern Kurdish theater in Turkey often accepts Evdirehîm Rehmîyê Hekarî’s 1919 play Memê Alan as the first Kurdish play. As a result of the political oppression and bans, however, there have not been continuous Kurdish theater practices in Turkey. Between 1919 and 1991, there were only three known Kurdish plays written in Turkey. The total number of written and staged Kurdish plays in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and SSCB during that period is around 500. With the repeal of Law No 2932 in 1991, the ban on the usage of the Kurdish language was officially removed. Yet, the political oppression and effect of the language ban have never ended. Since 1991, the Kurdish theater field has faced ongoing effects of the linguicidal policies of the republic and negotiated the changing politics of language and identity. This presentation will focus on the effects of these linguicidal policies on the production of Kurdish theater texts, the limited number of artists who can speak in their mother tongue, the debates on the usage of localdialects, surtitles, and assimilation, hybridization, non-verbal plays, and multilingualism.
 
 
Bilal Akar is a Ph.D. candidate at Boğaziçi University. He received his Master’s degree in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University with a thesis titled “Transformation of Kurdish Theater Field in Turkey 1991 – 2017.”
 
His recent study focuses on statelessness, fragmentation of Kurdish diaspora, identity construction, and representation of Kurdishness through theater in Europe. The research aims to make a comparative analysis of Kurdish Theater fields in different countries by engaging with several interwoven theoretical fields, including postcolonial criticism, political economy,Bourdieusian field analysis, and diasporic art studies.

KHAS ERC STAGING-ABJECTION WEBINARS 

Presentation: What a Peasant Could Know: On the Path and Performance of Modernity in the Context of (Post-)Socialist (Ex-)Yugoslavia
Speaker: Olivera Jokić and Christina Novakov-Ritchey 
Moderator: Rüya Kalıntaş
Time: Wednesday, December 15, 2021 at 7:30 pm Istanbul (GMT +3)
11:30 am New York 
4:30 pm London
5:30 pm Central European Time


The webinar will be in English.

Please register in advance for this meeting:
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88677142380
Meeting ID: 886 7714 2380
Passcode: 234015

Olivera Jokić and Christina Novakov-Ritchey’s workshop examines the political and epistemological charge that marks existing accounts of “peasant life” and the knowledge it has embodied across the region that was until relatively recently the nation-state of Yugoslavia. The workshop will foreground the way scholarship on performance, in conjunction with insights from other interdisciplinary fields, makes available new knowledge about the region that has long been studied primarily in the rigid and masculinist terms of political history, from sovereign nations and empires to wars and urban political institutions.
 
Jokić will focus on the significance of biographies of three women born to peasant families in the 1910s. Their life projects shape the politics and performance of gender and urbanization in the region to this day, down to neo-traditionalist demands for a “return to normal” and repolarization of gender categories that would befit a free-market society. 
 
Novakov-Ritchey’s presentation proposes that the progressive repudiation of peasant ways of knowing and being from the early nineteenth century through the present constitutes an ongoing program of colonially-informed epistemic violence.
 
Olivera Jokić is an Associate Professor of Literature and Gender Studies at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She is interested in the relationships between literary writing and historical documentation, especially the archives of colonialism; in the constitution of archives; in writing about gender and histories of “women’s writing.” She is a co-editor, with Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, of two recent journal special issues about relationships between archives and popular culture.
 
Christina Novakov-Ritchey is a PhD Candidate in Culture and Performance at the University of California – Los Angeles, where her research focuses on peasants, communism, ecology, folklore, and aesthetics in the Yugoslav region. Her next research project is a monograph on global postsocialist video and performance art. She is the co-organiser of the (Post)Socialist Studies Group funded by the University of California Humanities Research Institute and a core member of the Dialoguing Posts Network. She teaches on postsocialism, revolutionary art, feminism, critical folklore, and global colonialisms.

KHAS ERC STAGING-ABJECTION WEBINARS 

Presentation: Staging the State: The Politics of Opera and its Architecture in Early
Republican Turkey
Speaker: Ayça Sancar
Moderator: İlhan Çamiçi
Time: Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 7:30 pm Istanbul (GMT +3)
12.30 pm New York
5.30 pm London
6.30 pm Central European


The webinar will be in English.


Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88677142380
Meeting ID: 886 7714 2380
Passcode: 234015

The presentation will discuss the interplay between opera, architecture, and cultural politics in early republican Turkey, using opera and its architecture as a lens to examine politico-cultural transformations. It will investigate analogies between opera performances and the architecture of the buildings in which these performances took place, discussing the underlying politico-cultural aspirations. Addressing contemporary developments, the paper will also draw a bow between past and present approaches. Ayça Sancar studied architecture at Izmir Institute of Technology and RWTH Aachen University. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis at the Department of Architectural Theory of RWTH Aachen University and working as a teaching and research associate at the Institute of Landscape Architecture of the same university. Her doctoral research focuses on the interplay between opera, architecture, and cultural politics in the first three decades of the Turkish Republic and the architectural knowledge transfer between Turkey and the German-speaking world during this era. Her teaching practice is concentrated on digitalization in teaching, particularly on the development of online courses, animated videos for didactical purposes, and e-assessments.

KHAS ERC STAGING-ABJECTION WEBINARS

Archival Lives of Popular Culture

KHAS ERC STAGING-ABJECTION WEBINARS 

Lecture: Monument, Miniature, Souvenir: On the Material Temporalities of Hagia Sophia
Speaker: Dr. Jeremy F. Walton
Moderator: Gamze Tosun
Time: Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 8 pm Istanbul (GMT +3)
1 pm New York
6 pm London
7 pm Central European

Please register in advance for this webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_WV1ioIB8TPuC-Lhp2g_8yg

With the reconversion of Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque in July 2020, the field of politicized meanings surrounding the building and its history shifted yet again. Recent debates over Hagia Sophia’s status have pivoted on the dichotomy of the museum and the mosque as a clear expression of the ideological antinomy between secularism and Islamism in Turkey. In his presentation, Dr. Jeremy F. Walton pluralizes and complicates such dichotomies without ignoring the performative power of Neo-Ottomanism in relation to Hagia Sophia more generally.

By drawing on Susan Stewart’s (1992 [1984]) trenchant analysis of the gigantic, the miniature, the souvenir, and the collection, he delineates the multiple semiotic modalities that Hagia Sophia inhabits, and might inhabit. To begin, he conceptualizes the reconversion of Hagia Sophia into Aya Sofya-i Kabir Mosque as a performance of gigantism and monumentalism in Stewart’s sense, in tandem with the broader monumental infrastructural politics of the AKP. He then examines the miniatures of Hagia Sophia located in two theme parks, Istanbul’s Miniaturk and Beijing’s The World. In this context, Dr. Walton focuses especially on the distinct collections of miniatures assembled by the two theme parks and Hagia Sophia’s place within each of these assemblages. Finally, he concludes with a speculative contrast between two souvenirs of Hagia Sophia: a coin that commemorates its recent reconversion, and an antique photo album that potentially enunciates other, subaltern pasts. Dr. Jeremy F. Walton is a cultural anthropologist whose research resides at the intersection of memory studies, urban studies, the comparative study of empires and imperialism, and critical perspectives on materiality. He leads the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Dr. Walton received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2009. His first book, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), is an ethnography of Muslim NGOs, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey.

He has previously held fellowships at the University of Rijeka, Georg August University of Göttingen, Georgetown University, and New York University. Dr. Walton has published his research in a broad selection of scholarly journals, including American Ethnologist, Sociology of Islam, Die Welt Des Islams and History and Anthropology. He is also the co-editor of several volumes, including Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Art and Politics in the Modern Period (University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2019). “Empires of Memory,” which Dr. Walton designed, is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on post-imperial memory in post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman realms. In early 2022, he will inaugurate a new research group, “REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation” at the University of Rijeka (Croatia), with support from a European Research Council Consolidator Grant
(#101002908).

The webinar will be in ​English.

KHAS ERC STAGING-ABJECTION WEBINARS 

Book Talk: Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul
Speaker: Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoğlu
Moderator: Şeyda Nur Yıldırım
Time: Friday, May 21, 2021 at 8 pm Istanbul (GMT +3)

1 pm New York
6 pm London
7 pm Central European

Please register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtce2upj8jEtSxHmL6Q-4zJi4blYKYQKBj

In this webinar, Dr. Sehlikoğlu will be discussing her recent book Working out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul. The book traces Istanbulite women’s enthusiasm for exercise, or as they call it, spor merakı (interest in/curiosity about sports), which was pursued by one and a half million women during the years she conducted her field research. Sehlikoğlu explores this seemingly mundane activity as an interest in establishing a new self—one that attempts to escape from conventional feminine duties—and an investment in forming a more agentive and desiring self. Working Out Desire develops a multilayered analysis of how women use spor merakı to take themselves out of the domestic zone physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively and connects them to a global movement. 

Working out Desire presents the ways in which women’s changing habits, leisure, and self-formation in the Muslim world and the Middle East are connected to their agentive capacities to shift and transform their conditions and socio-cultural capabilities.

Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoğlu is a social anthropologist specialised in gender and subjectivity in the Middle East and Islamicate contexts. Her work often focuses on intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life. She has studied in Istanbul, Montreal, Toronto, and Cambridge before completing a research fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.  Dr. Sehlikoğlu is the editor of the book, The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality; the editor of three special issues, Everyday Intimacies of the Middle East, Why Revisit Intimacy?, and Fieldsights – Field Notes on Sports; and the author of two books, Kişilik Özelliklerine Göre Çocuk Eğitimi (Education and Children’s Personality Trait) and Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul as well as several articles. She is currently leading an ERC project titled “Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics Across the Balkan-to-Bengal Complex, TAKHAYYUL” on imagination and politics as Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Global Prosperity at the University College London:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/igp/dr-sertac-sehlikoglu

About the book: https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/2976/working-out-desire/

The talk will be in ​English. 

KHAS ERC STAGING-ABJECTION WEBINARS 

Roundtable: Special Issue on “Archival Lives of Popular Culture” at The Journal of Popular Culture

The latest issue of The Journal of Popular Culture, guest edited by Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay and Olivera Jokić, examines the complex relationship between archives and popular culture in the context of the “archival turn.” Bringing together a group of essays by scholars and practitioners, diverse in their geo-graphical focus and objects of interest, the special issue explores how studying popular culture materials can fundamentally advance our conceptions of the archive and how using the archive as a lens can enrich the study of popular culture. The essays reveal how the relationship of mutual and revitalizing pressure between archives and popular culture can produce critical knowledge about the desires that shape our social and political imagination of the future.

At the roundtable, the authors and the editors will discuss their essays and their broader work in relation to archives and popular culture.

Time: Thursday, April 22, at 8 pm Istanbul (GTM +3)

1 pm New York
6 pm London
7 pm Central European

Speakers:

Ann Larabee and Kurt Milberger on behalf of The Journal of Popular Culture, special issue editors Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay and Olivera Jokić, and the authors Lucie Česálková, Stanley H. Griffin, Lizabé Lambrechts, Schalk van der Merwe, Zeb Tortorici, İlker Hepkaner, Vivian L. Huang, William Ross, James K. Harris, and Pai Wang.

For the special issue, please visit https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15405931/2020/53/6

KHAS ERC STAGING-ABJECTION WEBINARS

Roundtable:

Special Issue on “Archives and Popular Culture” at Archives and Records

The latest issue of Archives and Records, guest edited by Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay and Olivera Jokić, explores how the changing notions of the popular affect how we imagine and build archives, and the opportunities and challenges popular culture materials present for archivists, institutions, and researchers. The four essays by practitioners and scholars study the strategies and practices of archiving popular culture in the early twenty-first century and suggest some ways in which archival work can shape popular culture. The authors take up theoretical concerns in light of the practical questions about the creation and interpretation of the archives of popular culture, from the ephemerality of records and storage protocols to the material and symbolic value of collections and their significance in the development of new philosophies and practices of teaching with the archive. At the roundtable, the authors and the editors will discuss their essays and their broader work in relation to archives and popular culture.

Time: Wednesday, March 10, at 11am EST
11:00 New York
16:00 London
17:00 Central European Time
19:00 Istanbul

Speakers: Sarah-Joy Maddeaux on behalf of Archives and Records, special issue editors Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay and Olivera Jokić, and the authors Katie Lanning, Saygun Gökarıksel, Christine A. Lutz, Tara Maharjan, Stephanie Crawford, Anne Peirson-Smith, and Ben Peirson-Smith

For the special issue, please visit https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjsa21/41/3