Human Rights Translations and Encounters with Europe in Turkey

This event will take place on Tuesday, 8 December 2015 from 16:30 to 18:00 at the Graham Wallace Room, 5th Floor, Old Building, LSE. Associate Professor Esra Ozyurek, Associate Professor and the Chair of Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute, LSE, will chair this event.The State in Training is a book project that traces the establishment of human rights as a governmental standard in Turkey, in tandem with the country's pending accession to the European Union (EU). Focusing on human rights training programs for Turkish state officials that are conducted to fulfil EU membership requirements, it uncovers how transnational standardization schemes and programs for good governance affect local bureaucracies. The book maps out how the translation of human rights to markers of good governance, such as professionalization and expertise shapes both the enactment of the state and the politics of human rights in Turkey. Based on long-term fieldwork between 2007-2014, the project articulates both the perils and the promises of these programs for the subjects and objects of governance in the country.

Elif Babul is an ACLS Fellow and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. Along with her primary specialization in national and transnational mechanisms of governance and the politics of human rights in Turkey, her research interests include everyday forms of state power and political authority, citizenship and national belonging, and the politics of gender in Turkey and the Middle East. Babül’s research was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner Gren Foundation fellowships. Her publications include articles in both English and Turkish in journals such as American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review and New Perspectives on Turkey; as well as edited volumes such as Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics.

This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Those who might be interested are all welcome. Please find attached a detailed advert of the event as a PDF document.