Since the turn of the 21st century, Turkey has experienced both the rise of democratization efforts making formerly excluded minority citizens more visible in public life and an authoritarian nationalism that has bolstered the country’s longstanding racial, religious, and political divides.
Drawing on extended fieldwork in Antakya (Antioch) near Turkey’s border with Syria, this talk focuses on the ambiguous sites of intimacy and social cohabitation that emerge for the minoritized from the interplay between these seemingly opposite political developments. Dagtaș examines how unevenly situated minority and refugee groups at Turkey’s national margins forge each other’s existence through reproducing religious differences amid various forms of precarity, political polarization, and structural violence.
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About the speaker
Seçil Dagtaș is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo. She specializes in the gender politics and secular governance of religious diversity, minority and refugee displacement, religious nationalisms, and the political potential of everyday sociality at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. Her current work examines the intersections of religion and gender in shaping border politics in Turkey and Cyprus, and probes the political possibilities and limits of solidarity as the condition of urban cohabitation between a diverse group of displaced Syrians and local citizens. She is particularly interested in how gendered social spaces along the Middle Eastern borders call into question humanitarian and state-centered approaches to refugee resettlement, and expand our understandings of what constitutes politics beyond formal political institutions and mechanisms.