Hosted by the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University and Research, September 1, 2023
In Kurdistan occupations and demonstrations by landless workers and peasants demanding land reform have taken place on a large scale since the middle of the 20th century. In more recent years, this contestation over land has overlapped with the rise of environmental activism. The workshop Contentious Politics in Kurdish Studies: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure addresses a number of theoretical debates and questions related to land.
Panel 1: Dams, Ecosystems and Counter-Insurgency
| Kamuran Akin | Uproot, Detach and Pacify: On the Turkish State’s Infrastructural Politics in northern Kurdistan |
| Eray Çaylı & Adnan Mirhanoğlu | Hydro-Infrastructural Violence in the Qoser/Kızıltepe Plain: Life between Waterlessness and Wateriness |
| Chair: Joost Jongerden | |
Panel 2: Prefigurative Politics of Place
| Marcin Skupiński & Dobrosława Wiktor-Mach | Intersectionality and Prefigurative Politics in Ecological & Urban Struggles in Northern Kurdistan |
| Filyra Vlastou – Dimopoulou | Politics and Negotiations of the Lavrio Kurdish Refugee Camp in Greece |
| Chair: Francis O’Connor | |
Panel 3: Water, Trees and Oil as Nationalist Anxieties
| Zeynep Oguz | “Petroleum is Our Blood”: Coloniality, Nationalism, and Petro-Politics in Northern Kurdistan |
| Mairead Smith | Dispossession, Labor, & Chronotopic Kinship in Post-Land Reform Sinjar |
| Pınar Dinc | Ecological Racism and Olive Tree Destruction in the Middle East |
| Chair: Ayhan Işık | |
Panel 4 Land and the Politics of Difference
| Seda Altuğ | Politics of Difference and Land in Kurdistan in Turkey and Syria (1925-1933) |
| Aysegul Aslan | Rethinking Dispossession and Displacement: Agricultural Workers in Urfa |
| Chair: Francis O’Connor | |
Affiliations of the participants
Kamuran Akin is an independent researcher who recently defended his PhD at the Institut für Europäische Ethnology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Seda Altuğ is a lecturer at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.
Aysegul Aslan is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at Fırat University, Turkey, and a visiting fellow at the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands
Eray Çaylı is a professor of Human Geography with a Focus on Violence and Security in the Anthropocene, Hamburg University, Germany
Pinar Dinc is a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University.
Ayhan Işık is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Centre de Recherche Mondes Modernes et Contemporains, Université libre de Bruxelles.
Adnan Mirhanoğlu is a researcher in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium.
Zeynep Oguz is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Marcin Skupiński is a Ph.D. candidate at Warsaw University, Poland.
Mairead Smith is a Ph.D candidate at Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Filyra Vlastou-Dimopoulou is a Ph.D. candidate in Human Geography (NTUA & Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
Dobrosława Wiktor-Mach is professor of Economics, Cracow University, Poland.
Organizers
Joost Jongerden – Associate professor at the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands joost.jongerden@wur.nl
Francis O’Connor – is a Marie Curie Skłodowska Post-Doctoral Fellow in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Francis.oconnnor@wur.nl
Centre for Space, Place and Society 