Building on their ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey, Ireland and Mexico, researchers Hazal Hürman and Cate Morley of Princeton University reflect on the power of names and the politics of naming.
What does it mean to give, erase, or efface a name? To re-christen? To reclaim? What do the acts of naming, unnaming, and renaming reveal about the histories of political violence and cultural belonging? In short, what’s in a name?
Drawing on their ethnographic fieldwork across Turkey, Ireland, and Mexico, Hazal and Cate will use the name as an entry point for exploring themes of anonymity and witnessing in research, law, and the archive; considering the aliases of outlaws, and the cartographies of outlawed places; and thinking through the struggles of those disappeared or erased from history. This salon will take the form of an open discussion between researchers and the audience, and will include documentary objects and images from their fieldwork.
Please join us in discussion as we explore how something as fundamental and intimate as a name can be called into question.
About the presenters:
Hazal Hürman is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Princeton University. Her ethnographic dissertation research centers on children's experiences and narratives as a route to understand ethno-racial affective sensibilities and political anxieties as they are reconfigured under Turkey's increasingly authoritarian regime. As part of her work, she explores the ethics and methods of children-oriented research agendas; the dialectical interplay between childhood as a construct and as lived experience; and the potential intersections between decolonial and child-centered epistemologies. By collaborating with her young research participants to visualize their living spaces, she engages children as co-producers of knowledge.
Cate Morley is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Princeton University. Her dissertation research concerns forced disappearance and humanitarian forensic intervention, and is informed by her work alongside forensic anthropologists and civilian activists to recover and identify the remains of Mexico’s desaparecidos. In a parallel project, in Ireland, she is examining the ongoing state investigation of, and public controversy surrounding, a mass grave discovered on the site of an institution that incarcerated unmarried mothers and their children.
Image credit: Danny Lyon, "Four Matachines, Tamazunchale, Mexico, 1973"
Presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
