Global Humanities Seminar: Post-Kemalism

As part of the Global Humanities Network, CIP Academic Director Professor Esra Özyürek will address an audience at Sabancı University, Istanbul. The seminar topic is “Post-Kemalism during the 75th and 100th anniversaries of the Turkish Republic”. The event will also be livestreamed via Zoom.

Abstract

As Islam grew out of its designated private realm in modern Turkey in the 1990s, it challenged secularism as an imported, disingenuous, and even forced, lifestyle. Secularists in return tried to legitimate their views and values as authentic and sincere by circulating modernist state symbolism in the private sphere through the market, the home, civil society, life history, and emotional attachment. In the last 25 years a lot has changed in Turkey.

In the last 20 years Islamist Justice and Development Party ruled the country and went through different stages where they supported neo-liberalism and later nationalism and authoritarian tendencies. In the time that passed, however, the secularist Kemalist ideas and the sense of nostalgia for them have not changed. This presentation will trace the continuities and changes in the nostalgic emotional and political approaches to Kemalism over the last 25 years and will make speculations about its future.

About the Global Humanities Network

The Global Humanities Network (est. 2020), anchored at Cambridge University, brings together leading universities from around the world: Fudan and Nanjing Universities in China, Ashoka University in India, the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, and Sabancı University in Turkey. The aim is to permanently transform how we all teach, research and think about the Humanities. All partner institutions are committed to the belief that deep and enduring engagement with each other is now more than ever essential to create new, genuinely global, perspectives on the most pressing issues the world currently faces, ranging from climate change, the polarization of society, violent conflict and its legacies, economic inequality within and between societies, identity clashes, and the impact of new technologies and new media.

Read more about the Global Humanities Network (via globalhumanities.org).

Practicalities

This seminar will be hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Tuzla campus. It starts at 1pm local time (GMT+3), corresponding to 11am UK time (BST, GMT+1).

For the option to join the audience on Zoom, please visit the Global Humanities Network event page.