The Columbia Global Center in Istanbul’s 2018-2019 Annual Report features project and affiliates of the Center for the Study of Social Difference. The Reframing Gendered Violence working group held four workshops in 2018 as a part of their workshop series hosted by the Istanbul Global Center. These workshops aimed to open up a critical global conversation among scholars and practicioners in order to reframe the issue of violence against women as it is currently discussed in a wide range of fields, both academic and policy-oriented. This series included “Beyond Prevalence: The Next Genderation of Campus Sexual Assault” on February 9th, “Institutionaled Violence and Gender: Innocence-Disposability-Resilience” on March 9th, “Interrogating Culture-Based Explanantions for Violence Against Women” on March 23rd, and “Turkish Students Present on Reframing Gendered Violence” on June 7th.
On September 25th, Women Mobilizing Memory (WMM) fellow and speaker at CSSD’s 10th Anniversary Symposium, Ayşe Gül Altınay, CSSD Executive Committee member and WMM co-director, Jean Howard, and director of the Queer Theory working group, Jack Halberstam, gave a talk entitled “Bridging Academia and Activism Thorugh Gender Studes.” The talk presented a critical reflection of the possibilities of doing feminism and gender studies in contemporary Turkey, with specific examples from the experiences of Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence.
Former CSSD director and co-director of the WMM working group, Marianne Hirsch, delivered a talk entitled “Women Carrying Memory: Stateless Figures,” along with Women Mobilizing Memory co-editor Ayşe Gül Altınay and Aylin Vartanyan. This talk looked at two recent memorial projects by feminist diasporic artists Mirta Kupferminc and Wangechi Muthu, which explored the vicissitudes and vulnerabilities of exile and statelessness, and suggested that stateless memory can open up the possibility of imagining alternative relationships between contemporary subjects and citizenship, national belonging, and home, as well as alternate temporalities of becoming.
The annual report also features a photo from a WMM Memory Walk conducted in Turkey. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, joined WWM fellow, Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, and Global Center Director and CSSD Women Creating Change Leadership Council member, Safwan Masri, for this insightful tour of Istanbul.
To view the entire 2018-2019 Annual Report from Columbia’s Global Center in Istanbul click here.