FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
PhD planning seminar: Embodied Memory in Post-violence Contexts: Circassians
Thursday 6 November, 13:15 - 15:00
Niagara, 9th floor, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1 or Zoom
Welcome to a PhD planning seminar titled Embodied Memory in Post-violence Contexts: Circassians— A Transnational Analysis.
Speaker
Gülnur Demirci, PhD student in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Malmö University, University of Groningen.
Abstract
This interdisciplinary PhD project drawing approaches from studies in memory, culture, migration, politics, and genocide investigates how contemporary Circassian communities in Türkiye, Russia, and Germany have developed and deployed embodied memory practices across the boundaries of nations. The study examines the role of diverse socio-political contexts and transnational networks in developing bodily memory practices surrounding the Circassian displacement following Russia’s conquest of the North Caucasus (1763–1864), which resulted in the forced deportation of approximately 1.2 million people to the Ottoman Empire. It offers a transnational mapping and comparative approach to the study of post-violence embodied memory. Thus, while interrogating the cross-border construction of memory practices, it also compares how the sociopolitical conditions in three different contexts, namely Russia- a multinational society with an ethnic-Russian core and (neo)imperial politics, Türkiye, a nation-state with a hegemonic Turkish nationalist ideology, and finally Germany, a European democracy, shape and regulate diasporic memory practices. The project aims to unfold the complex engagements among the embodied memory practices, their political and cultural underpinnings, messages concerning the past and future, and how these trajectories of entanglements enhance our understanding of the afterlives and after-effects of genocidal violence as well as how minorities’ cultural memory are formed across borders. In this seminar, I particularly focus on the case in Turkey and aim to provide insights into the issues concerning diverse populations in the face of rising nationalism that problematizes the actual diversity of cultural maps and people’s memories prevailing across the nation.
Attendance
This is a hybrid seminar, you are welcome to connect via Zoom or join us at MIM seminar room, floor 9, Niagara, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1. To attend on campus, please gather by the reception area at 13.05.
If you have any questions, send an email to mim@mau.se.
Zoom
Link will be available closer to the seminar date.
