Papers by Ezgican Özdemir
Ethnos Journal, 2023
This article studies how communities in northern Cyprus constitute their collective identities th... more This article studies how communities in northern Cyprus constitute their collective identities through their changing understandings of where northern Cyprus is – through the collective idiom of ‘half-island’. Looking at the Turkish state-funded water pipeline from Turkey to north Cyprus as a megaproject, I show how the pipeline and its connection of the two spaces steer communities of northern Cyprus into reflections about their location in relation to their geographical surroundings through situated idioms and metaphors of connectivity and scale. I argue that the megaproject is a site where Turkish Cypriot political actors reflect on their locality, region, and geography of a ‘half-island’ vis-à-vis a multiplicity of
hegemonic powers and the many states of exception. As they collectively contest a Turkish imposed privatisation of water infrastructure and its management, Turkish Cypriots widen their scalar thinking and situate the ‘half-island’ in ways that defy historically established (dis)connections in and around their island.
The 10th issue of Middle East – Topics and Arguments engages with infrastructure studies from an ... more The 10th issue of Middle East – Topics and Arguments engages with infrastructure studies from an interdisciplinary perspective. It presents different empirical cases and theoretical discussions that take infrastructural formations and their effects both to the center stage and as the analytical focus. In this editorial, we first discuss two epistemic locations from which infrastructure can be studied. Then, we highlight the featured authors and the way each of them make compelling cases through the lenses of material and social infrastructures in different MENA contexts. In light of these, we argue that infrastructures, as the material conditions of modern human life, have shaped and continue to shape geographical constructs of the Middle East and North Africa. Lastly, we call for further social and historical research to investigate how infrastructural systems as material and symbolic networks of imperial expansion and exploitation have contributed to the geographical and political entities that make up the construct called MENA.
Middle East : Topics & Arguments, 2018
In the following interview, Ronen Shamir discusses the theoretical and methodological implication... more In the following interview, Ronen Shamir discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of researching infrastructure against the background of his own work on electrification in Mandatory Palestine. He draws our attention to the (post-)colonial genealogies of infrastructure and their role in shaping not just the common perceptions of a region called “Middle East”, but also manufacturing/creating/ producing/constructing this region by means material and social (dis-)connections. Throughout the interview, Shamir stresses on how infrastructural systems shape people’s everyday experiences with their physical surroundings. His emphasis points to the understanding of infrastructure as processes of assembling and disassembling people, everyday objects. We invited Ronen Shamir to this interview in order to put his work into a critical dialogue/exchange with the papers featured in this issue. As a prominent scholar of colonial infrastructure, we are convinced that his work and hi...
The peer-reviewed online journal " Middle East – Topics & Arguments " (META) is calling for submi... more The peer-reviewed online journal " Middle East – Topics & Arguments " (META) is calling for submissions for its tenth issue on the topic of " Infrastructure ". Infrastructure points to the ultimate conceptual debates of social science; it highlights the strong connections between material things, lives, and practice with immaterial and ideational aspects of human life. Furthermore, infrastructural matters like pipes, dams, walls, grids, cables, etc. reveal and, even more so, complicate the relationship between nature and humanity. We believe that studying infrastructure leads to new horizons of understanding people's socio-political, moral and affective worlds and how they relate to conceptions of nature. Infrastructure as the topic for the tenth issue of Middle East – Topics & Arguments (META) offers a variety of conceptual approaches from many disciplines, such as history, anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, media studies and economics (among others), as the topic connects the research on practices of everyday life with questions of planning, state politics and local and global neoliberal developments. Further, Infrastructure provides an interesting departure point to study the material entanglements of infrastructure with modes of its facilitation and representation. Infrastructures, such as transportation, energy and water networks, facilitate everyday life, while at the same time rupture it at any given moment. They assemble all kinds of actors and agents once they are brought into being. As manifestations of diverging interests, infrastructures are always bound with relations of power and domination. They hence do not only embody and reproduce power relations, but also engender sites of resistance and subversion in times of social crises. These understandings of infrastructures will help us to study them as much more than technological accomplishments of the present, but rather as cultural semiotics that are deeply embedded in everyday politics and social relations. For this META issue, we are looking for submissions that not only interrogate infrastructural networks as spatial arrangements that lay out social organization, but also look back into the temporality of infrastructures: histories of colonialism and imperialism that once shaped Middle Eastern and North African societies and the post/neo-colonial continuations of material networks that facilitate and control communities. From the symbolic meanings to its material effects, its embeddedness in everyday politics and role in negotiations of power and resistance, infrastructures are indeed the key point for scrutinizing technological and developmental progress, neoliberalism and modernity at large. We welcome abstracts for proposed articles from scholars that employ infrastructure as a key conceptual instrument in understanding and researching commonalities and differences of the political, social and cultural worlds in the Middle East. Some suggested themes are:
This thesis focuses on the practice of tattooing Atatürk symbolisms in contemporary Turkey. A pra... more This thesis focuses on the practice of tattooing Atatürk symbolisms in contemporary Turkey. A practice that embodies and communicates the prominent state ideology of Kemalism, tattooing as a body modification, today is perceived as a practice that distinguishes subjects and indicates group or identity affiliation. The human body then, is utilized as a mediator of the individual"s identity formation. Kemalist tattoos in Turkey thus, communicate citizens" Kemalist sentiments and embody the demarcation between two identities of Kemalists/secularists and Islamists. Apart from such incorporation to a certain group, Kemalist tattoos are manifestations of Turkish citizens" particular understandings of their own social, political, and gendered subjectivities. Basing my research on an ethnographic field method, I first lay out the practice of Kemalist tattooing through the perspectives of tattoo artists, in order to demonstrate that Kemalist tattoos, according to their practitioners, harm the status of tattooing in the field of art. With this, I then move on to tattoo bearers and their positionalities within the practice. But more importantly, I argue that Kemalism, through these bodily inscriptions, as a social category among Turkish citizens, reifies other highly disputed and problematic categories like ethnicity, femininity, masculinity, and religiosity, which shapes people"s understandings of identity-making and politics in Turkey.
Conference Presentations by Ezgican Özdemir
This paper investigates how a network of water pipelines reflects the political engagements that ... more This paper investigates how a network of water pipelines reflects the political engagements that the communities they supply have with states, local governance systems, and with people's senses of time and belonging.
The paper takes as its ethnographic focus the context of north Cyprus and the recently built water pipeline running underneath the Mediterranean and connecting the Turkish mainland's freshwater resources to the Turkish-occupied territories of the island of Cyprus. I understand this incoming, supposedly clean and drinkable water not just as an object of political contention, but also as something that accentuates northern Cypriots' present conditions of dependency and inability to 'act upon' governing themselves, and reflects their imaginations and anticipations of an uncertain future.
Water infrastructure and its governance have been at the center of everyday political discussions in north Cyprus when it comes to interrogating notions of willpower, sovereignty, and taking matters into their own hands. These discussions among locals oscillate between expressions of incapability and incapacity—what I call the lethargic present—to govern the pipeline infrastructure, and aspirations of reclaiming their willpower in an uncertain future. Relying on ethnographic data, I present people's articulations of time, specifically impermanence, and uncertainty regarding water infrastructure. The temporality of infrastructure constitute the analytical focus for this paper; I interrogate how the Turkish state-funded water pipeline system encapsulates the conjunction between Cypriots' past appreciations, present grievances, and future expectations for themselves vis-à-vis the Turkish state. As such, I discuss how infrastructures invested with clear ambitions for the future can become material manifestations of contested pasts and presents. I contend that the incoming water and the network of pipelines engender new questionings of their lethargic present and uncertain future.
This paper argues that the political can most often be found in the technical and invisible detai... more This paper argues that the political can most often be found in the technical and invisible details of everyday life. I explore the trans-local and political negotiations that northern Cypriots cope with vis-à-vis the Turkish state's interventions, in relation to water infrastructure. In July 2016, the pipes and taps of northern Cypriots started to flow with 'Turkish' water. The "Project of the Century" is a pipeline that runs under the Mediterranean Sea, bringing clean water from Turkey to northern Cyprus and supposedly relieving northern Cypriots' everyday struggles of getting by with scarce, bitter and salty water. Prior to the arrival of 'Turkish' water, the controversy around its management had already ensued which raises the following questions: how does infrastructure constitute political subjectivities, and how do its technicalities reproduce certain ways of governing?
Ever since the military occupation by Turkey in 1974 and establishment of the de-facto state Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983, Turkish financial and provisional aid programs have become indispensable for northern Cypriot society. The water pipeline and its privatization is yet another scheme that renders the blurred lines of governance and sovereignty more visible. I inquire into how (Turkish and Turkish Cypriot) engineers and technicians, public officials in and around the Water Works department(s), and certain public figures perceive the politics of the pipeline and management of the water. These ethnographic insights reveal a crucial element of infrastructures in general; that these highly technical networks of utility and materiality spotlight and reveal different layers of the socio-political context. Therefore, this paper will argue that infrastructures' logistical, technical, and governing components offer insights on how political organizations are undermined or consolidated, how competing viewpoints are negotiated, and how power structures around the webs of relations are reproduced.
This paper examines how the post-construction debate on the water pipeline project in northern Cy... more This paper examines how the post-construction debate on the water pipeline project in northern Cyprus embodies the contested political terrain of the de-facto state Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and questions of sovereignty ever since the Turkish state intervention in 1974. I highlight how the water privatization debate not only constructs a space of contestation and struggle in public life, but also produces new questions that concern the economic, political, and materialized dependence and connectivity with the Turkish state. Theoretically engaging with recent scholarship on anthropology of infrastructure (Anand 2006, 2012; Elyachar 2012; Graham and Marvin 2001; Harvey 2010; Harvey and Knox 2012; Mains 2012; Larkin 2013; Von Schnitzler 2008, 2013; Smith 2016), I argue that infrastructure, as embodied in the Turkish invested water pipeline, becomes an imagined yet material space in which immaterial aspects of moral-political negotiations take place.
The water pipeline project, meant to bring clean water to TRNC from the southern coast of Turkey, has come to a halt as the TRNC government and the Turkish state have not been able to agree on whether the management of this enterprise would be in the hands of the private or public. It was also revealed in the official agreement that not only the water coming through the pipeline from Turkey, but also already existing natural water resources of northern Cyprus would be included in the privately-owned management. Causing a massive public outrage, the water privatization issue today is strongly opposed by the “Water Platform”, consisting of unions, municipalities, and many civil society organizations. Drawing upon my current ethnographic research, I explore how material infrastructure transforms people’s perceptions towards their landscape and the natural resource of water under it. Thus, water, being fluid, yet still tangible and material, becomes the symbol of a political endeavour that unearths bigger moral and political struggles of Turkish Cypriots against the Turkish state.
Infrastructure, in the case of TRNC, engenders spaces of civic organization and contestation against the hegemonic power and offers Turkish Cypriot citizens a new and concrete means to express their moral and political inclinations in performative and discursive ways. These spaces bring about moral and political questions of human rights, civic virtues and responsibilities and sovereignty. Therefore, I show how morality resonates in their endeavour to challenge dependency to the Turkish state and lack of sovereignty.
Master's Thesis by Ezgican Özdemir
This thesis focuses on the practice of tattooing Atatürk symbolisms in contemporary Turkey. A pr... more This thesis focuses on the practice of tattooing Atatürk symbolisms in contemporary Turkey. A practice that embodies and communicates the prominent state ideology of Kemalism, tattooing as a body modification, today is perceived as a practice that distinguishes subjects and indicates group or identity affiliation. The human body then, is utilized as a mediator of the individual‟s identity formation. Kemalist tattoos in Turkey thus, communicate citizens‟ Kemalist sentiments and embody the demarcation between two identities of Kemalists/secularists and Islamists. Apart from such incorporation to a certain group, Kemalist tattoos are manifestations of Turkish citizens‟ particular understandings of their own social, political, and gendered subjectivities.
Basing my research on an ethnographic field method, I first lay out the practice of Kemalist tattooing through the perspectives of tattoo artists, in order to demonstrate that Kemalist tattoos, according to their practitioners, harm the status of tattooing in the field of art. With this, I then move on to tattoo bearers and their positionalities within the practice. But more importantly, I argue that Kemalism, through these bodily inscriptions, as a social category among Turkish citizens, reifies other highly disputed and problematic categories like ethnicity, femininity, masculinity, and religiosity, which shapes people‟s understandings of identity-making and politics in Turkey.
Talks by Ezgican Özdemir
Central European University, 2019
In this episode, I am hosting Ezgican Özdemir. We will talk about the symbolic meanings ascribed ... more In this episode, I am hosting Ezgican Özdemir. We will talk about the symbolic meanings ascribed to water and infrastructures in Northern Cyprus, which also includes gendered imageries of motherhood. Ezgi conducted impressive fieldwork on the water pipelines transferring water from Turkey to Northern Cyprus.
Ezgi will make a compelling case for these symbolic meanings as an important lens through which locals understand the dependent and unequal relations between Northern Cyprus and Turkey. She will also explain how such symbolic meanings play an important role in mediating the daily life experiences of living under a de-facto state that remains unrecognized by the international community to this day. https://podcasts.ceu.edu/content/politics-water-northern-cyprus-gendered-symbolisms-and-infrastructures-power
Books by Ezgican Özdemir
Commoning the City, 2020
This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban com-moning practices th... more This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban com-moning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics. The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts , ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus-on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks , claims to urban leisure space, migrants' appropriation of urban space and workers' cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban-scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care.
Uploads
Papers by Ezgican Özdemir
hegemonic powers and the many states of exception. As they collectively contest a Turkish imposed privatisation of water infrastructure and its management, Turkish Cypriots widen their scalar thinking and situate the ‘half-island’ in ways that defy historically established (dis)connections in and around their island.
Conference Presentations by Ezgican Özdemir
The paper takes as its ethnographic focus the context of north Cyprus and the recently built water pipeline running underneath the Mediterranean and connecting the Turkish mainland's freshwater resources to the Turkish-occupied territories of the island of Cyprus. I understand this incoming, supposedly clean and drinkable water not just as an object of political contention, but also as something that accentuates northern Cypriots' present conditions of dependency and inability to 'act upon' governing themselves, and reflects their imaginations and anticipations of an uncertain future.
Water infrastructure and its governance have been at the center of everyday political discussions in north Cyprus when it comes to interrogating notions of willpower, sovereignty, and taking matters into their own hands. These discussions among locals oscillate between expressions of incapability and incapacity—what I call the lethargic present—to govern the pipeline infrastructure, and aspirations of reclaiming their willpower in an uncertain future. Relying on ethnographic data, I present people's articulations of time, specifically impermanence, and uncertainty regarding water infrastructure. The temporality of infrastructure constitute the analytical focus for this paper; I interrogate how the Turkish state-funded water pipeline system encapsulates the conjunction between Cypriots' past appreciations, present grievances, and future expectations for themselves vis-à-vis the Turkish state. As such, I discuss how infrastructures invested with clear ambitions for the future can become material manifestations of contested pasts and presents. I contend that the incoming water and the network of pipelines engender new questionings of their lethargic present and uncertain future.
Ever since the military occupation by Turkey in 1974 and establishment of the de-facto state Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983, Turkish financial and provisional aid programs have become indispensable for northern Cypriot society. The water pipeline and its privatization is yet another scheme that renders the blurred lines of governance and sovereignty more visible. I inquire into how (Turkish and Turkish Cypriot) engineers and technicians, public officials in and around the Water Works department(s), and certain public figures perceive the politics of the pipeline and management of the water. These ethnographic insights reveal a crucial element of infrastructures in general; that these highly technical networks of utility and materiality spotlight and reveal different layers of the socio-political context. Therefore, this paper will argue that infrastructures' logistical, technical, and governing components offer insights on how political organizations are undermined or consolidated, how competing viewpoints are negotiated, and how power structures around the webs of relations are reproduced.
The water pipeline project, meant to bring clean water to TRNC from the southern coast of Turkey, has come to a halt as the TRNC government and the Turkish state have not been able to agree on whether the management of this enterprise would be in the hands of the private or public. It was also revealed in the official agreement that not only the water coming through the pipeline from Turkey, but also already existing natural water resources of northern Cyprus would be included in the privately-owned management. Causing a massive public outrage, the water privatization issue today is strongly opposed by the “Water Platform”, consisting of unions, municipalities, and many civil society organizations. Drawing upon my current ethnographic research, I explore how material infrastructure transforms people’s perceptions towards their landscape and the natural resource of water under it. Thus, water, being fluid, yet still tangible and material, becomes the symbol of a political endeavour that unearths bigger moral and political struggles of Turkish Cypriots against the Turkish state.
Infrastructure, in the case of TRNC, engenders spaces of civic organization and contestation against the hegemonic power and offers Turkish Cypriot citizens a new and concrete means to express their moral and political inclinations in performative and discursive ways. These spaces bring about moral and political questions of human rights, civic virtues and responsibilities and sovereignty. Therefore, I show how morality resonates in their endeavour to challenge dependency to the Turkish state and lack of sovereignty.
Master's Thesis by Ezgican Özdemir
Basing my research on an ethnographic field method, I first lay out the practice of Kemalist tattooing through the perspectives of tattoo artists, in order to demonstrate that Kemalist tattoos, according to their practitioners, harm the status of tattooing in the field of art. With this, I then move on to tattoo bearers and their positionalities within the practice. But more importantly, I argue that Kemalism, through these bodily inscriptions, as a social category among Turkish citizens, reifies other highly disputed and problematic categories like ethnicity, femininity, masculinity, and religiosity, which shapes people‟s understandings of identity-making and politics in Turkey.
Talks by Ezgican Özdemir
Ezgi will make a compelling case for these symbolic meanings as an important lens through which locals understand the dependent and unequal relations between Northern Cyprus and Turkey. She will also explain how such symbolic meanings play an important role in mediating the daily life experiences of living under a de-facto state that remains unrecognized by the international community to this day. https://podcasts.ceu.edu/content/politics-water-northern-cyprus-gendered-symbolisms-and-infrastructures-power
Books by Ezgican Özdemir
hegemonic powers and the many states of exception. As they collectively contest a Turkish imposed privatisation of water infrastructure and its management, Turkish Cypriots widen their scalar thinking and situate the ‘half-island’ in ways that defy historically established (dis)connections in and around their island.
The paper takes as its ethnographic focus the context of north Cyprus and the recently built water pipeline running underneath the Mediterranean and connecting the Turkish mainland's freshwater resources to the Turkish-occupied territories of the island of Cyprus. I understand this incoming, supposedly clean and drinkable water not just as an object of political contention, but also as something that accentuates northern Cypriots' present conditions of dependency and inability to 'act upon' governing themselves, and reflects their imaginations and anticipations of an uncertain future.
Water infrastructure and its governance have been at the center of everyday political discussions in north Cyprus when it comes to interrogating notions of willpower, sovereignty, and taking matters into their own hands. These discussions among locals oscillate between expressions of incapability and incapacity—what I call the lethargic present—to govern the pipeline infrastructure, and aspirations of reclaiming their willpower in an uncertain future. Relying on ethnographic data, I present people's articulations of time, specifically impermanence, and uncertainty regarding water infrastructure. The temporality of infrastructure constitute the analytical focus for this paper; I interrogate how the Turkish state-funded water pipeline system encapsulates the conjunction between Cypriots' past appreciations, present grievances, and future expectations for themselves vis-à-vis the Turkish state. As such, I discuss how infrastructures invested with clear ambitions for the future can become material manifestations of contested pasts and presents. I contend that the incoming water and the network of pipelines engender new questionings of their lethargic present and uncertain future.
Ever since the military occupation by Turkey in 1974 and establishment of the de-facto state Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983, Turkish financial and provisional aid programs have become indispensable for northern Cypriot society. The water pipeline and its privatization is yet another scheme that renders the blurred lines of governance and sovereignty more visible. I inquire into how (Turkish and Turkish Cypriot) engineers and technicians, public officials in and around the Water Works department(s), and certain public figures perceive the politics of the pipeline and management of the water. These ethnographic insights reveal a crucial element of infrastructures in general; that these highly technical networks of utility and materiality spotlight and reveal different layers of the socio-political context. Therefore, this paper will argue that infrastructures' logistical, technical, and governing components offer insights on how political organizations are undermined or consolidated, how competing viewpoints are negotiated, and how power structures around the webs of relations are reproduced.
The water pipeline project, meant to bring clean water to TRNC from the southern coast of Turkey, has come to a halt as the TRNC government and the Turkish state have not been able to agree on whether the management of this enterprise would be in the hands of the private or public. It was also revealed in the official agreement that not only the water coming through the pipeline from Turkey, but also already existing natural water resources of northern Cyprus would be included in the privately-owned management. Causing a massive public outrage, the water privatization issue today is strongly opposed by the “Water Platform”, consisting of unions, municipalities, and many civil society organizations. Drawing upon my current ethnographic research, I explore how material infrastructure transforms people’s perceptions towards their landscape and the natural resource of water under it. Thus, water, being fluid, yet still tangible and material, becomes the symbol of a political endeavour that unearths bigger moral and political struggles of Turkish Cypriots against the Turkish state.
Infrastructure, in the case of TRNC, engenders spaces of civic organization and contestation against the hegemonic power and offers Turkish Cypriot citizens a new and concrete means to express their moral and political inclinations in performative and discursive ways. These spaces bring about moral and political questions of human rights, civic virtues and responsibilities and sovereignty. Therefore, I show how morality resonates in their endeavour to challenge dependency to the Turkish state and lack of sovereignty.
Basing my research on an ethnographic field method, I first lay out the practice of Kemalist tattooing through the perspectives of tattoo artists, in order to demonstrate that Kemalist tattoos, according to their practitioners, harm the status of tattooing in the field of art. With this, I then move on to tattoo bearers and their positionalities within the practice. But more importantly, I argue that Kemalism, through these bodily inscriptions, as a social category among Turkish citizens, reifies other highly disputed and problematic categories like ethnicity, femininity, masculinity, and religiosity, which shapes people‟s understandings of identity-making and politics in Turkey.
Ezgi will make a compelling case for these symbolic meanings as an important lens through which locals understand the dependent and unequal relations between Northern Cyprus and Turkey. She will also explain how such symbolic meanings play an important role in mediating the daily life experiences of living under a de-facto state that remains unrecognized by the international community to this day. https://podcasts.ceu.edu/content/politics-water-northern-cyprus-gendered-symbolisms-and-infrastructures-power