This plenary session, delivered as part of the 2026 Kurdish Studies Conference by Marlene Schäfers, University of Utrecht and Kurdish Studies Journal and Welat Zeydanlıoğlu, Kurdish Studies Network, was a conversation about the state of Kurdish Studies as a scholarly field. The session was moderated by Veli Yadirgi.

Marlene Schäfers is associate professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the impact of state violence on intimate and gendered lives, voice and memory, and the politics of death and the afterlife.

She specializes in the anthropology of the Kurdish regions and modern Turkey. Her first monograph, Voices that Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is based on long-term ethnographic research with Kurdish female singers and poets and sets out to theorise the voice as an object of aspiration, resistance, and cooptation. It was awarded the annual Book Prize of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association in 2024.

Welat Zeydanlıoğlu is the founder and coordinator of the Kurdish Studies Network(KSN), a global academic research network. He is also the founder of Kurdish Studies, an international, peer-reviewed academic journal. He was the managing editor of the journal between 2013-2022. He is known for his work in the field of Kurdish studies, particularly regarding the Kurdish question in Turkey.

For more information about the Kurdish Studies Conference, follow this link: https://www.lse.ac.uk/middleeastcentre/news/kurdish-studies-conference-2026