Burcu Ozdemir “Affective Ecologies: The Political Life of Water in Northern Kurdistan”
Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this dissertation examines the entanglement of war, hydroelectric dam projects, and ecologies in Northern Kurdistan. Due to its mountainous geography with rivers running through deep valleys, Northern Kurdistan’s landscape has always been perceived as a central threat by the Turkish state. Especially since the 1990s, with the impact of the war, the ecological destruction of the region became more systematic. Controlling the rivers by constructing dams has turned into a military strategy in the hands of the state. Focusing on the Tigris River and its tributaries, this dissertation traces the processes through which infrastructures and ecologies are coproduced in an ongoing war and the ways in which ecologies enable, extend, and resist enduring violence. Taking the river both as an object and an actor in the unfolding of relations, it seeks to answer how water materializes as state power, becomes the terrain of dispossession, and functions as a sign of belonging or loss in different moments. Accordingly, it argues, as that which is both controlled, and uncontrollable, by human and state forces, the water becomes an emblem of and vehicle for the violence and limits of colonial and national power.
Lilianna Quiroa-Crowell “Forgotten Invisibility: Mapping the erasure and resistance of urban Q’eqchi’ women in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala”
This project examines the ‘forgotten place’ of Puerto Barrios, Guatemala to understand the relationship between urban Indigenous erasure, cartographic representations, and racialized national imaginaries. This banana corporate enclave city was once central to notions of modernity in Guatemala but is now narrated as a dangerous, male, and non-Indigenous peripheral space. I explore the sociopolitical impact of state/corporate cartographic representations and ask how urban Q’eqchi’ women unsettle the racial-gendered hierarchies built into national spatializations through their alternative geographies of urban Maya belonging and justice. This 12-month project utilizes archival methods to examine the transformation of cartographic representations of Puerto Barrios and the racial hierarchies linked to these shifting geographies that continue to shape the present. I utilize ethnographic and participatory counter-mapping methods to explore how urban Q’eqchi’ women question the limits of existing geographies of Puerto Barrios through their alternative urban spatial epistemologies and practices. I ask: How have overlapping interest groups imagined and constructed the spatial geography of (in)visibility of the Puerto Barrios across time? How is geographic erasure experienced, grappled with and made livable by Caribbean Q’eqchi’ women? What role does this spatially discontinuous city play in the construction of the racialized alterity in Guatemala and contemporary Indigenous resistance?
