In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur interviews Penn State professor Mark Sentesy. Sentesy introduces his research in philosophical anthropology and the Anthropocene and discusses how ancient views on human relationship to nature compare to our modern-day conceptions. Underscoring the significance of a philosophical understanding of environmental justice concerns today, Sentesy also shares his pedagogical approaches to teaching climate ethics.

In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik interviews Dr. Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu. Dr. Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu discusses her new book project Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel: Histories of Lands, Animals, and Peoples beyond the Nature/Culture Divide on shamanism in contemporary literature, encompassing Northern Siberia, China, North America, Australia, and Turkey. She highlights the importance of kinship and forging ties with other human and more-than-human life forms as resistance to overextraction and global capitalist discourses. Lastly, we explore the current trends, studies, and communities in literature and environment and environmental humanities in Turkey.

This episode is a recording of the Unraveling the Anthropocene roundtable, our keynote event which was held on March 29 of 2021, in the context of the Comparative literature luncheon speaker series.

Merve Tabur (LAC vice president) introduced the speakers and served as moderator.

The event gathered over 50 attendees from various departments, who participated in an enriching Q&A session. The Q&A session was not recorded.

During the event, speakers shared audiovisual materials with the audience. Visit our website to see some of those materials.

In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik interviews Berfin Çiçek, a graduate student in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University in Turkey. They discuss Berfin’s project on the revival of trauma and intergenerational memory catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Berfin takes the testimony of a member from the descendent generation of Dersim massacre victims from Turkey, his grandfather, into the focus of her project while exploring how traumatic experiences trigger each other and create an intergenerational memory in general, and more specifically, during the COVID-19 quarantine. Berfin considers testimonials crucial evidence and attributes to established theories, mostly by Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub.

In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik has a conversation with Dr. Michele Prettyman on the intersection between academic and spiritual discourses. The episode explores certain political implications of excluding certain views of life and inhabiting the world. Dr. Prettyman advocates for spiritually animating inquiry as a part of our lives. This part of inquiry opens a space for discovery and imagination to engage with life’s bigger questions as a response to very few people outside of certain fields being invited to those conversations. The ways in which we process knowledge by excluding spirituality reveal the limitation of racism and white patriarchy. Dr. Prettyman offers her way of challenging and undoing those models with spiritual discourse. She interrogates how the category of “the human” is fraud and an incomplete category. Focusing on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, she positions spirituality as another dimension of human experience in navigating life amidst racial, social, and environmental pandemics to rethink systems and structures that center life beyond violence and exploitation.