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CALL FOR PAPERS
MESA Annual Meeting
November 22-25, 2014, Washington, D.C.
*Kurdish imaginations – Imaginations of Kurdishness*
Organizers:
Marlene Schäfers (PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Susan Benson-Sokmen (PhD Candidate, History, University of Toronto)
Panel abstract:
With a “solution process” underway in Turkey promising to end the 30 year old “Kurdish conflict” and with the declaration of autonomy by Syria Kurds in “Rojava” (Syria), this past year has brought the possibility of momentous change to Kurdish geographies in the Middle East.
Considering these recent changes to articulations of “Kurdishness,” as well as a century of social, political and economic upheaval, this panel seeks to explore the worlds of imagination upheld by ordinary Kurds as they inhabit the interstices of radical transformations. Taking up Jongerden and Casier’s (2012) injunction to understand the Kurdish movement “not from a ‘distanced’ or ‘distant’ position, but from the way in which they themselves have been giving meaning to their struggle,” this panel brings together papers based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork that focus on the ways in which Kurds imagine themselves, their struggle and their society. How do Kurds view their past and what aspirations do they hold for their future? What hopes and desires do they hold regarding their language(s) and their communities, and how do they envision their cultural life? How do Kurds imagine their history – and what histories might we be able to write from their imaginations? How do they negotiate multiple belongings to Kurdish, Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi and Diasporic geographies?
We seek to understand Kurdish society “as a dynamic society with its own historical processes” rather than examining it only as it relates to “the non-Kurdish neighbor or the government” (Klein 2011). This entails paying attention to the specificity of imaginations held by Kurdish women and children, by guerrillas and their families, by pious Muslims or leftist activists. Papers in this panel thus converge in their attempt to draw out the kinds of subjectivities that emerge from and are constructed by imaginations, desires and aspirations and in this way seek to map out Kurdish society as it is ordinarily lived – and as it comes to be imagined.
Please submit abstracts for paper propsals (300-400 words) by February 9, 2014 to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]
Authors of papers selected for the panel will be asked to submit their abstracts to MESA via their online submission system by February 15, 2014.
Submission guidelines and online submission instructions for paper abstracts can be found here: http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/annual-meeting/call-for-papers.html
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Marlene Schäfers
PhD Candidate | Department of Social Anthropology | University of Cambridge
Trinity Hall | Cambridge CB2 1TJ | U.K.
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