Joint Session w/ Disability Studies Workshop – February 9th – S. Can Açiksoz “States of Betrayal”

The Disability Studies and the Medicine & Its Objects Workshops Present:

S. Can Açiksoz | Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UCLA

Discussant: Eman Elshaikh  | PhD Student, UChicago Anthropology

*Wednesday, February 9th from 4:30-6:00pm CT*

Via Zoom Only 

Please email Anna Prior (priorah@uchicago.edu) to RSVP and receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper and the Zoom information.

ABSTRACT: Defined by the global surge of the far right and populist authoritarian leaders, our world-historical moment is flooded with political discourses of betrayal. What does a global political climate pervaded by the many senses of betrayal and treason say about the practice and horizon of anthropology? In this article, I use my fieldwork with the ultranationalist disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish War as a window into thinking through how betrayal can help us spell out the practical, ethico-methodological, and political challenges faced by ethnographers, particularly those working on the far right or under conditions of political violence. Extending the discipline’s methodological debates beyond a focus on the dyadic relation between the ethnographer and the research subjects, I show how ethnographic betrayals are circumscribed by the work of sovereignty and the law.