Abteilung für Hochschulkommunikation

Research Factory “The Sigh of Displacement: Affective Imaginaries of Post-Gezi Migration from Turkey”

Due to escalating political oppression in Turkey after the 2013 Gezi movement, many dissident academics, artists, journalists, and students left for Berlin, Germany. Based on engaged ethnographic research across media, artistic projects, and public events, this talk examines affective practices and imaginaries that mediate the lived experiences of post-Gezi displacement. Through examples of audiovisual art, online blogs, and YouTube videos, it explores how they form subjectivities, relationalities, and belongings through the collective and political emotions they reveal, create, circulate, and archive. Rather than confining them to a distinct sphere of migrant culture or community, it situates these affective imaginaries within broader frameworks for living with and acting on troubled times, drawing on feminist and queer explorations of negative affect and cross-boundary relationalities.