Description:

Join KMTS and Postdoctoral Fellow, Ekin Kurtiç on May 15, 2024 from 12:30- 2:00PM CST for "Dams as More-than-technical Infrastructures," part of our Unruly Ecologies series! 

Ekin Kurtiç is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is at the intersection of political anthropology, infrastructure studies, political ecology, and environmental history. She is the 2022-2024 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. This talk will draw on her book manuscript in progress, titled Sedimented Landscapes: Building Dams, Restoring Ecologies in Turkey, which critically examines state-led projects of restoring and salvaging nature in the process of large dam building. The central question that runs through the book is the following: How does nature restoration come to matter in the process of large dam construction, which materially and figuratively submerges socio-natural landscapes? In this talk, Kurtiç will offer an ethnographic examination of one such state-led nature restoration projects, namely Çoruh Watershed Rehabilitation Project conducted by foresters and villagers in the uplands to protect the dams from the detrimental impacts of soil sedimentation.