Laboring to Keep the Dead Alive: Commemoration and Social Reproduction in the Kurdish Movement

Hosted in collaboration with the Critical Security Studies Hub at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar

Speaker: Marlene Schäfers, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University

The Centre for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at GU-Q invites you to a conversation with Dr. Marlene Schäfers on her research exploring commemoration, kinship, and care in the Kurdish freedom movement.In this talk, Dr. Schäfers asks, “What kind of labour is involved in keeping the dead alive?” Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among members and followers of the Kurdish movement, she examines how communities devote significant time and emotional energy to commemorating those who have fallen in the four-decade-long struggle for Kurdish autonomy. She proposes understanding these acts of remembrance as a form of reproductive labour, through which fallen guerrillas are transformed into ancestors of a Kurdish body politic in the making.Dr. Schäfers approaches martyrdom as a question of post-mortem care, reframing commemoration not as ideological extremism or propaganda, but as a deeply relational practice that sustains both memory and social bonds. Her analysis reveals how the reproduction of social communities depends not only on the making of life but also on the sustenance of afterlife, challenging established hierarchies of gender, age, and lineage.

Join us for this thought-provoking discussion that sheds new light on how political struggle, kinship, and care intersect in contexts of violence and resistance.

Marlene Schäfers is associate professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the impact of state violence on intimate and gendered lives, voice and memory, and the politics of death and the afterlife. She specializes in the anthropology of the Kurdish regions and modern Turkey. Her first monograph, Voices that Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey, was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2023 and awarded the annual Book Prize of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association in 2024.