All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Narrating Memory at Home and in the Street: Conflict over Identity in a Historic Neighborhood in Istanbul
| This paper uses lifestory narratives to trace the history of a neighborhood in Istanbul. Tesvikiye was established in the nineteenth century to house palace administrators and royal grooms of the Ottoman Empire. From its inception, the neighborhood was the breeding ground for a Turkish/Muslim bourgeoisie. It saw the gradual loss of a non-Muslim bourgeoisie—Levantine, Greek, Armenian or Jewish. Nineteenth century mansions were replaced during the Turkish Republic with family-owned apartment buildings. From the 1960s, a construction boom transformed the face of the neighborhood as land values rose with growing demand for housing due to in-migration. But the most important change in Tesvikiye came with globalization. After the 1980 military coup, Turkey was incorporated into networks of global capital, and what was a residential neighborhood became a showcase for the new international financial and media elite. The public sphere was transformed as local administrators used neighborhood space as a display case for exhibits financed by international firms. Cafes and restaurants cater to professionals working in glass-encased skyscrapers while shoppers mob exclusive boutiques on the week-end. Today, there is a war of words going on in Tesvikiye—a conflict of identities in the public sphere which the external glitter cannot hide. I show how individuals from different ethnic-religious, class and cultural backgrounds represent the history of the neighborhood to speak to diverse audiences and to create their different, warring identities in the present. I argue that the struggle in and for Tesvikiye represents a wider conflict in Turkish society facing a divisive past in the divided present.
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