Echoing Karamustafa’s work—which gives voice to figures silenced in order to escape history’s oppressive narratives—Marlene Schäfers’ anthropological, artistic, and political presentation will provide an insight into the narratives and strategies experienced by minorities such as Kurdish women in Turkey.

Biography

Marlene Schäfers is assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the impact of state violence on intimate and gendered lives, the politics of voice and memory, and the imaginations of life and the afterlife. She specialises in the anthropology of the Kurdish regions and modern Turkey. Her first monograph, Voices that Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2023 and won the 2024 Book Award of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. The book investigates Kurdish women’s struggle for a voice in contemporary Turkey, advancing a fine-grained analysis of how and with what consequences liberal politics incite minoritarian subjects to raise their voices. She has also published a biography in Kurdish and Turkish of a Kurdish singer, Dengbêj Gazîn, entitled Ez Gazîn Im: Jineke Dengbêj (co-authored with Ergun Sibel Yücel, Aram Publishers, 2021). Since 2022, she has been the managing editor of the Kurdish Studies Journal. Together with the Orient-Institut Istanbul, she is currently involved in a project to digitise and make open access an archive of cassette tapes containing Kurdish women singers’ voices.

Practical information

26.03.25, 18:30
Doors: 18:00
Language: English
Duration: 1 hour

Image (b&w) Braxton Hood.