Sie sind herzlich einladen zum Online-Vortrag von Dr. Özge Yaka, Univ. Potsdam.

Gender and Environmental Activism against Hydropower in Turkey’s East Black Sea Region: A Body-Centered Perspective

Der Beitrag verbindet Aspekte des Umweltaktivismus in der Türkei (Protest gegen Wasserkraftwerke) mit Themen der Gender-Forschung.

Der Vortrag ist Teil der Ringvorlesung Global Environmental Humanities an der Universität zu Köln und zugleich Teil der Ringvorlesung Turkey-Related Gender Issues.

Am Mittwoch, den 26. Januar 2022, 18 Uhr.

Den Link zum Vortrag erhalten Sie unter
https://uni-koeln.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIpdOGrrDksE9O0axkcONoJlVh80FJE-jh5



Zur Referentin
Özge Yaka
University of Potsdam, Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity
https://www.bim.hu-berlin.de/de/personen/dr-oezge-yaka/

Vortragsabstract
Gender and Environmental Activism against Hydropower in Turkey’s East Black Sea Region: A Body-Centered Perspective

Drawing on extensive empirical research on grassroots environmental struggles against private, small scale run-of-river hydroelectric power plants (HEPP) in the rural highlands of the East Black Sea region of Turkey, this paper explores how gendered division of labour, gendered organization of everyday practices and ways of relating to immediate environments shape motivations, discourses and actions of local men and women in opposing HEPP projects in the East Black Sea region. It argues, as one of the central findings of the study, that the gendered relationship between human communities and non-human environments is conditioned by but not limited to the realm of necessity. In other words, it is not the use of river waters as a “natural resource” that drives women’s anti-HEPP resistance, it is their embodied, sensory and affective connections with river waters. These embodied connections also shape their sense of place, memories and personal histories, which motivates their activism. Rather than attributing human-non-human connectivity to specific cosmologies and beliefs, this paper introduces a body-centered approach to analyze the dynamics of anti-HEPP activism. In doing so, this paper shifts the focus to the lived bodies of women and their connection to the living environments, without falling back into essentialist conceptions of gender. Drawing on the phenomenological, new materialist and posthumanist feminist literatures, it connects gender, body, environment and subjectivity by constructing corporeal encounters and experiences, senses and affects as media of political agency. By combining empirical research on gender and environment – in the context of the anti-hydropower movement in Turkey – with state of the art critical and feminist theories, this paper aims to provide an alternative approach to study gender and environmental activism.