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This event was held on 30 April 2021

Protection of Heritage in Situations of Protracted Conflict: Perspectives from Turkey (30 April 2021), with Zerrin Ozlem Biner (Kent) and Sardar Saadi (SSHRC Canada)

This Webinar is co-chaired by Lynn Meskell and Claudia Liuzza

Zerrin Ozlem Biner

University of Kent in the United Kingdom
Heritage as State of Exception: Ruination, Restoration and (Dis)possession in the Old city of Mardin

Dr. Zerrin Ozlem Biner is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at School of Anthropology and Conservation at University of Kent.  She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Prior to coming to Kent, Dr Biner held post-doctoral fellowships at Zentrum Moderne Orient, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and University of Cambridge. Biner’s research focuses on themes about state, citizenship, violence, forced displacement, heritage, memory, justice and reconciliation processes in the conflict and post-conflict settings of the Middle East. Biner has engaged ethnographically with the political, social and psychic effects of the protracted conflict in the Kurdish region of Turkey through the perspective of Kurds, Arabs and Syriacs/ Assyrians, as well as diasporic communities residing in Sweden and Germany. She is the author of “States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey” and co-editor of “Reverberations: Violence across Time and Space” a volume that offers new methodologies and concepts for the study of violence with an anthropological focus on relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities.

Sardar Saadi

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Heritage as Witness: War, Destruction, and Displacement in the Old City of Sur, Diyarbakir

Sardar Saadi is an awardee of the postdoctoral fellowship program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). He holds his postdoctoral fellowship tenure between 2020 and 2022 at the Rural Sociology Group of the Department of Social Sciences at Wageningen University. He recently graduated from his doctoral program in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His PhD research examines urban dynamics of the Kurdish struggle for self-determination in Diyarbakir, Kurdistan. Saadi’s research interests include Kurdish culture and politics, self-determination, sovereignty, social justice, urban and political anthropology, and welfare politics. He is the host and producer of a podcast called The Kurdish Edition.

UTS acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Boorooberongal people of the Dharug Nation, the Bidiagal people and the Gamaygal people upon whose ancestral lands our university stands. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands.

The UNESCO Chair and UTS supports the Uluru Statement from the Heart and its implementation in full.

UNESCO Chair in International Law and Cultural Heritage
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