Gendered Memories of War and Political Violence Young Researchers' Conf.

Gendered Memories of War and Political Violence Young Researchers’ Conference, organized in the framework of the Central European University – Sabancı University Joint Academic Initiative by Ayşe Gül Altınay (FASS), Çiçek İlengiz (Cultural Studies MA Student), Andrea Petö (CEU) and Borbala Klacsmann (CEU Ph.D. Student) took place on December 7 and 8 in Budapest.

The conference was preceded by the design and teaching of a course on gendered memories of war and political violence at CEU (by Andrea Petö) and SU (by Ayşe Gül Altınay) in Spring 2012, and an international conference on the same topic in May 2012 in Istanbul.  Çiçek İlengiz and Borbala Klacsmann, after taking the course and participating in the May Conference, joined the organizing team for the Young Researchers Conference.

For the Young Researchers Conference, the Call for Papers was circulated in the summer and attracted more than 100 applications from 25 countries. 42 of these papers were selected for presentation at the conference held at CEU.

The conference started with a roundtable on “Gendering Genocide” chaired by Karoly Bard, where Andrea Petö and Ayşe Gül Altınay presented on the state of the literature on gender in Holocaust and Armenian Genocide Studies.  The Roundtable was followed by 13 panels on such topics as visualizing war, political violence, and genocide; methodological challenges and new historiographies; literary representations of war, memory, and gender; testimony; sexual violence; motherhood; women’s political agency and resistance; gendered memories in cinema; and confronting ethnicized memories of state and communal violence.

Four students from Sabanci University, as well as a Sabancı University, Cultural Studies BA Alumnus, presented papers at the conference.

• Ceren Yartan (Cultural Studies BA) presented her paper “Ephemeral Sounds in Jacob’s Room” on the panel Literary Representations on War, Memory, and Gender.
• Michelle Wren Haskin (Conflict Resolution MA Student) presented her paper “‘Gay Genocide’ Rhetoric:  Emergence from and Appropriation of Gay Memories and Memorials of the Holocaust” on the panel Gendering Genocide.
• Can Zeynep Sungur (Political Science PhD candidate) presented her paper “Peace Is Life: The Case of Peace Mothers as an Anti-War Movement in Turkey” on the panel Motherhood, War and Memory.
• Pınar Ensari (Cultural Studies MA) presented her paper “Insecure Subjectivities, Fearful Memories: Kurdish Women Students Remembering the War in Eastern Turkey” on the panel Gendered Memories of War.
•  In the last panel of the conference, Confronting Ethnicized Memories of State and Communal Violence, Çiçek İlengiz (Cultural Studies MA Student) presented her paper entitled “Aestheticization of a Loss: The Case of the Fabiato Mansion”.

The conference concluded with a general discussion, followed by a “feminist city tour” organized and presented by Andrea Petö, whereby the participants and audience of the conference were introduced to a gendered reading of the history and major sights of Budapest.

For the conference program and other information on the Project:

http://myweb.sabanciuniv.edu/genderconf/

Click here for the video prepared by CEU on the conference.