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Refugees, displacement and moving bodies: studying loss and the language of dance

Dance offers an avenue to communicate experiences of loss (for example of refugees, expelled ethno-religious or national minorities) beyond language barriers.

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Ulrike Image 1_0.jpg
Ulrike Image 1_0.jpg

Dance performance in the Duncairn centre, Belfast, 14 December 2017. All rights reserved.This week’s series, 'Turkey: crisis and loss', curated by Mehmet Kurt, will unpack the connections between crisis in contemporary Turkey and a politics of loss. It is inspired by a recent collaborative Queen’s University Belfast and Bilgi University Istanbul Global Challenges Workshop which took place in Istanbul in June 2017.

The workshop chose the concept of ‘loss’ to better understand social transformation in the context of internal/international migration and displacement in Turkey. We discussed ‘loss’ both in its psychosocial reading as a form of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, sadness, trauma, and depression and within a social-scientific frame as contested sets of relations and structures of feeling in historical, economic and socio-political processes.