Archive, Lectures

Aslı Iğsız: “Revisiting Gezi Protests and Authoritarianism in Turkey”

Aslı Iğsız is Assistant Professor 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 heterogeneity in late Ottoman and contemporary Turkish contexts. Her current book project, Humanism in Ruins: Habitus, Memory, and the 1923 Greek-Turkish Compulsory Religious Minority Exchange explores the habitus of recollecting remnants of the ruins of modern nation states and dynamics of diversity in contemporary Turkey.

The Gezi Park protests, and the state response to them, have ignited questions and debates on various issues such as the institutionalization of neoliberalism, centralization of powers, cronyism, an increasing tendency of authoritarianism, minority governmentality, and encroachment on professional independence and labor rights. This paper will address these dynamics with a special focus on the rise of authoritarian surveillance in the context of the high security neoliberal nation states in general, with Turkey as a particular instance.

Event cosponsored by: Middle Eastern Studies, Human Rights Project, Center for Civic Engagement

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