K. Zeynep Sarıaslan

The EASA AGM Seminar in Bern simply came in a bad time. It confronted me with a dilemma: while I was eager to follow the workshops and act in solidarity with my colleagues and a common future, I simultaneously knew that every hour I spent at the event kept me away from work and by extension from the hope that I will have a future. I was writing the introductory chapter of my thesis with the aspiration of finally concluding a long epoch of my life – life as a doctoral student. However, for me, like so many others, working feverishly on the completion of a PhD thesis feels like running towards a cliff, because I do not know what comes next.

In this article, I provide a critical assessment of empowerment in the context of the Southeast Anatolia Region of Turkey (or southeast Turkey), using the example of one particular gender awareness project. I focus on women’s responses to, and engagements with, the empowerment discourses and practices that surround them, besides other normative
political projects. I look not only at women’s organisations, and their relations with public institutions, but also at participants’ perceptions of gender projects and differences among women more generally.

This article aims to focus on the economic activity of forestry which has received relatively little attention so far in Turkish rural studies. Instead of drawing quick conclusions, my aim is to understand insiders’ subjective positions as well as the relation between their everyday local practices and the larger economic system on the national and global levels. In this sense, this article intends to illustrate how people from small localities develop tactics in response to the strategies of global capitalism, by drawing a picture that depicts the economic relations constructed around a single product, bay leaf.

In this presentation, I will share findings of an ethnographic research done in 2009 in Kars, located North East Turkey, to examine the perceptions of the novel Snow written by Orhan Pamuk. I will discuss how Karsians perceive the Armenian question as the residents of a city which borders one of the historically constructed ‘others’ of the nation. Concerning the present political and economic interests at the global scale, I will show how the challenge of the nation state is experienced at the local level.