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State Control in Turkey: Resistant Encounters in War and Peace | Umut Yıldırım (UCLA), Dilan Okçuoğlu (American University), Wendy Pearlman (Northwestern) 

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co-sponsored by the MENA Studies Program and the Keyman Program

Dr. Dilan Okcuoglu is a postdoctoral fellow in Global Kurdish Studies at the American University, School of International Service in Washington, DC. Prior to that, she was a visiting scholar at the Cornell University, M. Einaudi Center for International Studies. Also, affiliated with the Center for Democracy and Diversity at Queen’s University and the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Democracy and Diversity at the Université du Québec à Montréal since 2018-2019. She received her PhD and MA in Political Studies from Queen’s University in Canada. She has another MA degree from Europe (Central European University); finished her undergrad in economics (Bogazici University). In addition to academic life, she has keen interest in diplomacy and policymaking. Dr. Okcuoglu has an interdisciplinary background in politics, economics and philosophy. Her teaching and research interests primarily lie in the politics of MENA, conflict and peace studies, comparative territorial and border politics, democratization, global justice, ethnic politics and nationalism as well as state-minority relations in conflict zones.  Okcuoglu has already published book chapters (Oxford University Press and Palgrave Macmillan) and op-eds (in the Conversation; Peace Insight; Jerusalem Post; Daily News; National Post). She is currently working on her article manuscripts and a book proposal in DC.

Umut Yildirim is an anthropologist working at the intersection of political, medical, and environmental anthropology with an ethnographic perspective from the Armenian/Kurdish region in Turkey. Dr. Yildirim is currently a research fellow at UCLA CNES and a lecturer at the UCLA Department of Anthropology. A manuscript for her first book, Low Intensities: Politics of Extraction and Refusal in a Middle Eastern Capital, is in the works.

Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she also holds the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence. Her research focuses on the comparative politics of the Middle East, social movements, political violence, refugees and migration, emotions and mobilization, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She is the author of four books: Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (2003); Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (2011); We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria (2017); and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors (2018, co-authored with Boaz Atzili). Her current book project focuses on the meaning of home, exile, belonging, and identify in a context of protracted war and indefinite displacement.