Berna Turam: Contested Cities: Inclusion of Muslim Piety to Secular Places

Date: 

Friday, October 28, 2016, 2:15pm to 4:00pm

Location: 

Center for European Studies (CES) 27 Kirkland Street, Hoffman Room

Seminar on Exclusion and Inclusion in Europe presentation by Berna Turam – Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, Northeastern University
Discussant: Sibel Bozdogan – Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Professor of Architecture, Kadir Has University

How do the city and urban ways of life influence democracy? Berna Turam explores how urban space can create new and creative politics, particularly in Turkey, where the authoritarian regime cracks down on disagreement and opposition in civil society, political society and in political institutions. Her ethnography analyzes urban contestation, which enables new alliances both in exceptional moments like the Gezi protest and in everyday life. The particular processes of inclusion and mixing in urban sites challenge the binary view of Islamist-secularist conflict, as city life frees urbanites from old ideological antagonisms. With a locus of two contested cities, Istanbul and Berlin, Turam argues that the process of democratization is not the reduction of conflict, but rather the capacity to form new alliances out of it.
    
This event is co-sponsored by the Özyeğin Forum Speaker Series    

See also: Seminars