Daily display of the conflict in Diyarbakir. 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.
To witness death, not only hearing the detailed stories of how people get killed, seeing circulated images of the tortured bodies but also becoming a target yourself, knowing that you are killable like anyone else, accompanies you in the streets of Diyarbakır. It is this threat of death indeed, that cuts life into pieces. The ensuing interplay of life and death unmakes and remakes everyday life in the city.
