Göçek Delivers Campagna-Kerven Lecture
Professor Fatma Müge Göçek delivered the 22nd annual Campagna-Kerven Lecture on Modern Turkey on April 19, 2017. The lecture was hosted by the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.
Göçek, a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, delivered a lecture entitled “Minorities in Turkey: From the Ottoman to the Republic” during which she discussed her research on the impact of processes such as development, nationalism, religious movements and collective violence on minorities.
Professor of International Relations and Anthropology at the Pardee School Augustus Richard Norton introduced Göçek, and commended her extensive research on Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.
“Our speaker is an extremely prolific and prodigious author,” Norton said. “She has a prodigious record of scholarship on Turkey and the late Ottoman Empire. You can find many of her books in Mugar Library. Her books encompass an impressive breadth of topics including Ottoman encounters with the West, the reconstruction of gender in the Middle East, social constructions of nationalism in the Middle East, redefining state and society from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic and questions of genocide.”
Göçek discussed how her past and current research traces the history of violence by both the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey against minorities including the Armenians and subsequently the Kurds.
“I will be talking about minorities in Turkey and the work that I just finished on the denial of violence against the Armenians, centering on the Armenian genocide and the violence preceding and succeeding it,” Göçek said “My new work basically looks at violence against the Kurds.”
Göçek said her current research focuses on the different types of violence, particularly non-physical violence, currently used against minorities in Turkey.
“In the transition to the Republic, Kurds were being taken on as the new other, and that continues to this day,” Göçek said. “Their othering continues to this day, and they still make up about 17 percent of the population of Turkey. I decided to focus on the victims, and to try to understand what are the different kinds of violence, especially the non-physical violence that we suffer as citizens of contemporary nation-states.”
The Campagna-Kerven Lecture series was launched by Madame Suzanne Campagna to provide a forum for informed discussion and debate about modern Turkey, and particularly to inspire students to learn about the country. The multidisciplinary series was inaugurated in 1996 and it features scholars, artists and public intellectuals. The annual lectures have addressed and will continue to address a rich variety of themes on modern Turkish society, economy, culture and politics. Campagna’s father, Mehmet Nahid Kerven, who died in 1974, was one of the famed “Young Turks.”