Hybrid lecture by Anoush Suni, Ph.D, UCLA Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Scholar.
Monday, May 12, 2025
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Pleas click here to participate via the Zoom Webinar platform (registration not needed).
This talk focuses on the overlapping histories of the Armenian and Kurdish communities in the region of Van in southeastern Turkey through an exploration of spaces of material ruination. Landscapes of ruins are testament to the repeating cycles of state violence against these minority communities over the past century. Through the examples of Armenian and Kurdish homes destroyed by genocide and war, a century apart, I demonstrate how spaces of destruction become dynamic sites in which understandings of the past, politics in the present, and possible futures are negotiated, imagined, and enacted.
Speaker:
Anoush Tamar Suni, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Promise Armenian Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. She also earned her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently working on her first book project, which investigates questions of memory and the material legacies of state violence in the region of Van in southeastern Turkey, with a focus on the historic Armenian and contemporary Kurdish communities. Her research has been published in the journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Anthropological Quarterly, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
Introduction:
Salih Can Aciksoz is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he also holds affiliations with Gender Studies and the Interdisciplinary Program in Disability Studies. His multi-award-winning book “Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey” (University of California Press, 2020) chronicles the post-injury lives and political activism of the disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war. His new project “Humanitarian Borderlands” focuses on political contests over medical humanitarianism along and across the Turkish-Kurdish-Syrian border. In addition to these long-term projects, Aciksoz has also written on trauma, assisted reproduction, LGBTIQ+ parenting, non-lethal technologies, prenatal genetic testing, authoritarian populism, and feminist and queer resistance in journals including Current Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Men and Masculinities, and Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.
Sponsor(s): The Promise Armenian Institute, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Anthropology, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research NAASR, Ararat-Eskijian Museum