Ozge Serin
Affiliation
- Graduate Student Fellow, Department of Anthropology
Research
A native of Turkey, Ozge Serin came to the United States for the first time in 1992 to pursue her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago where she discovered her interest in anthropology. In 1996, she received her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and returned to Turkey to study Ottoman Turkish history. After receiving her M.A. in History from Boðaziçi University in Istanbul, she began her doctoral studies in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in 2000. Her doctoral dissertation, Â"Sacrificial Politics and Ethics of Dying: Death Fast Resistance in Turkey, 2000-2007,Â" examines the relationship between sovereignty and sacrificial violence.
Dissertation Abstract:
Sacrificial Politics and Ethics of Dying: Death Fast Resistance in Turkey, 2000-2007
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the mass hunger strike in Turkish prisons triggered by the Turkish stateÂ's decision to transfer leftist political prisoners to F-type prisons modeled after the US-style maximum security prisons for solitary confinement in 2000. It examines the relationship between sovereignty and insurgent forms of political self-sacrifice. Based on formal interviews with surviving death fasters, ex-political prisoners, their families, medical and forensic doctors, legal advocates, human rights activists, journalists and writers conducted over a two year long fieldwork, and augmented by discursive artifacts and archival research on the mass mediation of the event, it explores self-sacrifice in its personalized and contextual modalities, focusing on the historical and cultural constitution of such a radical political subject. Emphasizing the exceptional nature of the death fast as a liminal experience that stages a deferred death (or life) for viewers who could, in principle, intervene, the dissertation demonstrates that the imagined political and ethical effects of the death fast are undermined in and by the multiple and contradictory practices and discourses of individual death fasters, families, political communities, doctors and the national public. The failure of sacrificial politics and of ethical relations among these different constituencies culminates in the mute violence within the leftist communities at the margins of the nation.
