Ruined futures: managing instability in post-earthquake Van (Turkey)
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: This article investigates how ruined materialities are implicated in projects of governance by affecting people's abilities to engage with the future. Based on ethnographic material from the Kurdish‐inhabited city of Van (Turkey), which was heavily damaged by two earthquakes in 2011, I analyse Turkish state authorities’ mobilisation of expertise regarding Van's ruined built environment as a form of techno‐political governance. Yet as ruins’ material properties continuously exceeded attempts at governing them, they created a particular structure of risk, thereby contributing to the formation of political subjects feeling themselves to be at the constant peril of both natural and political disaster.
Source: Social Anthropology
Author: Marlene Schäfers
Institutions: Université Libre de Bruxelles, University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2284049552