School of Social and Political Science

Description

Join guest speaker Dr Marlene Schäfers for an exploration of the significance of photos of fallen guerrilla fighters for Kurdish liberation.

Many followers of the socialist Kurdish liberation movement surround themselves with photographs of fallen guerrilla fighters who they respect and celebrate as martyrs. These images hold considerable power: they are able to direct speech, shape bodily comportment, and command the everyday lives of their spectators. This event asks where this potency stems from and what effects it has. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish communities in Turkey and Europe, it argues that displays of martyrs’ photographs project a Kurdish body politic in the making, enrolling both those whom they depict and those who handle them into an alternative project of sovereignty that remains under acute assault. Key to this effect is how these photographs materialize the sacrifice of lifetime made by the fallen while at the same time making distinct demands on the disposable time of those who contemplate them. Martyrs’ photographs in this way enrol their spectators into a series of sacrificial conversions with a view to revolutionary redemption in the future. Spectators, however, may reject the temporal exchanges that the photographs embody and demand. It is in those moments when the photographic operation breaks down, that the fragility of the photographic medium as a means of political mobilization comes to the fore. And yet it also highlights how photographs can act as crucial material sites where political belonging and commitment are fashioned, gauged, and potentially rebelled against.

Speaker: Dr. Marlene Schäfers (Utrecht University)

Chair: Dr Lotte Segal (University of Edinburgh)

Discussant: Dr Mihaela Mihai (University of Edinburgh)

Speaker Bio:

Marlene Schäfers is Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Dr Schäfers' research focuses on the impact of state violence on intimate and gendered lives, the politics of death and the afterlife, and the intersections of affect and politics. She specializes in the anthropology of the Kurdish regions and modern Turkey. Her first monograph (forthcoming) investigates Kurdish women’s struggle for voice in contemporary Turkey. By reading actual voices alongside voice as a potent metaphor for agency and empowerment, it advances a fine-grained analysis of how liberal politics incite minoritarian subjects to raise their voices and how the promises of liberation and recognition this move entails are routinely disappointed. Dr Schäfers' second research project focuses on the politics of afterlives in the Middle East. Through an ethnographic investigation into how the dead acquire powerful afterlives as martyrs, saints, and heroes, the project conceptualizes afterlives as a central site for the exercise, nourishment, and sustenance of sovereignty.