Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop

Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop 2013: Coming to Terms with War, Genocide, and Political Violence

Istanbul, May 31- June 2, 2013

Sabancı University
in collaboration with Istanbul Policy Center, Hrant Dink Foundation, and Anadolu Kültür

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The turn of the 20^th century was marked by anxieties of militarization, armament, and war preparation throughout the world, to be followed soon by the “Great War” that resulted in previously unimaginable destruction. The rest of the century witnessed “world wars,” genocides, ethnocides, politicides, hot and cold wars of various kinds, civil wars, military coups, and other forms of political violence. These experiences, as well as their contested memories, shape life and death at the turn of the 21^st century.

This year’s Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop focuses on the various means and challenges of “coming to terms” with wars, genocides, and political violence. Some of the questions that we hope to address in the workshop include (but are not limited to):

• How do different actors theorize, problematize, or utilize the ways in which past experiences of war, genocide, and political violence shape the present? How do alternative ways of remembering such experiences relate to or contest one another?
• What new concepts or theoretical frameworks promise new openings in the debates on “coming to terms”?
• What are the local, national and international legal tools and mechanisms that have been developed for “coming to terms” with past atrocities? What are the lessons from several decades of experience in “transitional justice” mechanisms?
• How do social movements such as the human rights, anti-racist, feminist and LGBTQ movements contribute to critical memory work on wars, genocides, and other forms of political violence?
• How are wars, genocides and other forms of political violence remembered and memorialized through monuments, museums, and other memory sites? How do they shape individual and social processes of “coming to terms”?
• How should the “pedagogy of coming to terms” be approached? What are the different pedagogical tools that have been developed for “coming to terms”?
• How do popular culture, film, literature, and (auto)biographical texts reconceptualize and deal with war, genocide, and other forms of political violence?
• How do (written, oral or visual) testimonies challenge or reinforce the hegemonic accounts of wars, genocides, and other forms of political violence?
• To what extent does the concept of trauma help make sense of and come to terms with wars, genocides and political violence?
• What are the reasons and implications of decades of silence on certain kinds of atrocities during wars and genocides (such as sexual violence, homophobic and transphobic violence, victims as perpetrators, violence experienced by marginalized groups such as the Roma, etc.)? What additional means of “coming to terms” have been suggested or implemented for addressing these silences?

Applications

Please send a paper abstract (max. 300 words), together with your name, affiliation, address, email and phone number to hrantdink-workshop@sabanciuniv.edu.

There are limited funds for accommodation available for those participants who do not have other sources of funding to attend the workshop. When submitting your abstract, please indicate your need for an accommodation grant.

The application deadline is March 11, 2013.

Organizing Committee
Ateş Altınordu
Ayşe Kadıoğlu
Ayşe Gül Altınay
Çağla Aydın
Faik Kurtulmuş
Fikret Adanır
Gülayşe Koçak
Nedim Nomer
Sibel Irzık

Made possible thanks to the generous support of