Anthropology Colloquium is the department’s speaker series that invites a mixture of anthropologists from within and outside of UBC to present their research. This speaker series is scheduled throughout the academic year, typically with a lunch reception in the AnSo Lounge.
Spaces of Education, States of Ruination and Survival
Thursday September 11, 2014
Anthropology and Sociology Building (ANSO) 2107
4:00 pm
Event Poster: PDF
Dr. Ayşe Parla
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Cultural Studies & European Studies, Sabanci University, Istanbul
Abstract
Taking my cue from the recent interest in ‘ruins’ as indexing both physical and social states of ruination, this talk will examine the historical and contemporary links between, on the one hand, physically abandoned buildings in Istanbul that were once Armenian minority schools, and on the other hand, the different states of social abandonment undocumented Armenian migrant children find themselves in despite their limited and largely informal access to minority schools. My focus on ruins as not mere remnants of the past but as presently embodied states also seeks to explore how the denial of genocide induces melancholy and impedes mourning in the national education system to which Armenian children in Turkey both without and with formal citizenship are exposed.
Bio
Dr. Parla received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from New York University. She is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology in the programs in Cultural Studies and European Studies at Sabanci University, Istanbul. Dr. Parla has written on state-authorized virginity examinations in Turkey as modern forms of surveillance of young women’s honor; the appropriation of Bulgarian Turkish migrants as refugees and ethnic kin in 1989 and the subsequent marginalization of post-1990s migrants from Bulgaria as part of the cheap informal labor force. She has published on questions of migration, citizenship, labor and ethnicity in various journals including Alternatives: Global, Local, Political; American Ethnologist; Citizenship Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Differences; and International Migration. As a visiting scholar at Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study, she is pursuing the current impediments to Armenian migrant children’s access to education in Turkey within a broad historical perspective on minority education from the Ottoman Empire throughout the Republic nation-state.
Co-Sponsored by: UBC Department of Anthropology and Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
