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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Qatar:20260702T080000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Qatar:20260702T170000
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SUMMARY:Laboring to Keep the Dead Alive: Commemoration and Social Reproduction in the Kurdish Movement
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Marlene Schäfers\, Associate Professor\, Department of Cultural Anthropology\, Utrecht University \n\nOn November 13\, CIRS hosted a lunch talk in collaboration with the Critical Security Studies Hub at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University\, titled “Labouring to Keep the Dead Alive: Commemoration and Social Reproduction in the Kurdish Movement.” \n\nIn this talk\, Dr Marlene Schäfers explored how the Kurdish movement understands and mobilizes martyrdom as a form of labour that sustains the community. Drawing on examples of funerals\, memorial ceremonies\, social media tributes\, and the production of “martyr albums\,” she showed that these practices constitute a vital mode of reproductive labour\, one that preserves continuity and identity when biological kinship cannot be relied upon.  \n\nWhat emerged clearly is that these acts of remembrance are not peripheral or decorative. They are central to how the movement reproduces itself. In contexts where traditional forms of kinship or biological reproduction cannot be relied upon\, especially in guerrilla camps marked by precarity and constant threat\, memory becomes a primary means of sustaining life. The speaker drew attention to the idea that narration itself becomes a reproductive act. Each story\, each obituary\, each ceremony extends the presence of the dead into the lives of the living. Through this narrative labour\, the community cultivates what one might call descendants or extended selves\, people whose identities form through their attachment to martyrs and to the struggle they represent. \n\nA striking quote from the presentation captured this ethos: “We have learned that there are other ways of multiplying.” In other words\, the reproduction of the community does not depend on producing biological offspring. Instead\, it comes from producing affective ties\, political commitment\, and a shared sense of continuity. As one Kurdish interlocutor explained\, “If you go to Kurdistan\, to Rojava\, and ask who Martyr Zîlan is\, everyone will tell you. In this way martyrdom becomes a means of reproducing the existence of the people\, and of the person herself.” Martyrs do not disappear; their memory generates new forms of political life. \n\nThe presentation also highlighted how internationalist volunteers in Rojava engage with this culture of martyrdom. For many of them\, the emotional and ethical demands of this form of commemoration require a departure from liberal Western assumptions that individual life is the highest good. Instead\, they are encouraged to adopt a long-term\, historical view: to understand their lives as part of a continuum that includes those who fought before them and those who will continue the struggle after. This shift in orientation is both necessary and unsettling. It asks individuals to situate their grief within a broader collective horizon. \n\nThis does not mean that death becomes easy. On the contrary\, participants repeatedly acknowledged that death remains bitter. One writer described rebelling against each new announcement of martyrdom\, asking\, “Why is there death? Are we condemned to lose our beautiful friends forever?” Even language seems insufficient. “No single word does justice to them\,” another wrote. The task of writing about the dead becomes a dilemma: if one writes\, the attempt feels inadequate; if one does not write\, the memory risks disappearing. This tension is precisely what pushes many to take up the pen again\, despite what they describe as their own lack of skill. Writing becomes a moral responsibility. \n\nUltimately\, the speaker argued that martyrdom in the Kurdish movement is not only a political symbol. It is a mechanism of social reproduction\, a way of keeping the community alive under conditions of war\, displacement\, and uncertainty. \n\nArticle by Maryam Daud\, Administrative Assistant at CIRS \n\n\n\n\nMarlene 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. 
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/laboring-to-keep-the-dead-alivecommemoration-and-social-reproduction-in-the-kurdish-movement/
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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Qatar:20260706T080000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Qatar:20260706T170000
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SUMMARY:The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group III
DESCRIPTION:June 22\, 2020		\n\n					\n				@			\n			\n				4:00 pm			\n		\n									\n					–				\n			\n							\n					June 29\, 2020				\n\n									\n						@					\n					\n						5:00 pm					\n				\n			\n						 \n\n\nOn June 8\, 2021\, the Center for International and Regional Studies convened a third virtual working group under its research initiative on The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. During this paper workshop two chapter contributions were presented and discussed\, which received in-depth feedback from the group. \n\nDr. Bronwen Everill\, presented the first paper titled\, ““The Dignity of Labor”: Liberian Industrial Education in West Africa.” The chapter looks at the role of Liberia within West Africa\, as a site of educational innovation and the launch of US state-based missionary and educational enterprises. The author explores the close internal relationship between Liberia and Sierra Leonean and the use of education as a way of maintaining Liberian sovereignty. By the end of the 19th century\, Liberian engineers were training African workers for plantation labor\, domestic housework\, and for skilled and unskilled industrial labor in places as far away as German Togo\, British Nigeria\, and the Belgian Congo. At the start of the 20th century\, Liberians had become part of a mobile class of African engineers\, missionaries\, and educators spreading American values and ideas on the continent. The paper addressed the literature about Liberia and its use of education in their struggle for sovereignty and independence. The author argues that Liberians used whatever means at their disposal to ensure that Liberia was not incorporated into the British or French Empire\, by ensuring their effective control over and domination of the indigenous populations of Liberia. \n\nNext Dr. Helge Wendt presented his paper titled\, “Industrial-Technological Education in Spanish America during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” The paper provides a comparative study of early industrial education schools in five Latin American countries i.e. Chile\, Argentina\, Mexico\, Cuba\, and Colombia. These schools of Arts and Trades were opened in the 19th century with the goal of training young men\, and later young women\, in practical and technical fields of production. The author states that the history of industrial education in these countries can be divided into different initiatives related to higher education\, primary education\, professional training\, and further training. In this comparative study\, Wendt wants to understand the school foundations and subsequent reforms in their local\, inter-local\, national and international contexts. School regulations\, teachers and student recruitments play a special role in the analysis of the different developments. Also\, connections of the school with the existing school system and the hopes for stimuli for the economic activity in the respective country will be studied. \n\nThe third paper workshop for the project is scheduled for the end of June\, in which three scholars will present their draft papers and receive commentary. \n\n\nFor the meeting agenda\, click here.\n\n\n\nFor the participants’ biographies\, click here.\n\n\n\nFor the research initiative\, click here.\n\n\nParticipants and Discussants: \n\n\nMaram Al-Qershi\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nDanya Al-Saleh\, University of Wisconsin–Madison\n\n\n\nHossein Ayazi\, Williams College\n\n\n\nZahra Babar\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nJulia Bates\, Sacred Heart University\n\n\n\nMisba Bhatti\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nOliver Charbonneau\, University of Glasgow\n\n\n\nBronwen Everill\, University of Cambridge\n\n\n\nArun Kumar\, University of Nottingham\n\n\n\nSuzi Mirgani\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nDolf-Alexander Neuhaus\, Free Berlin University\n\n\n\nSarah Steinbock-Pratt\, University of Alabama\n\n\n\nKarine Walther\, Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nElizabeth Wanucha\, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar\n\n\n\nHelge Wendt\, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin\n\n\nArticle by Misba Bhatti\, Research Analyst at CIRS
URL:https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/the-gospel-of-work-and-money-global-histories-of-industrial-education-virtual-working-group-iii/
LOCATION:Education City\, Al Luqta St\, Ar-Rayyan\, Doha\, Qatar
CATEGORIES:American Studies,CIRS Faculty Research Workshops,Race & Society,Regional Studies
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