Cultures of Conflict Symposium - Issam Kourbaj: Urgent Archive In Context

Yael Navaro

Yael Navaro is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is from Istanbul, Turkey and has conducted anthropological research in Istanbul and in Cyprus, as well as ongoingly in Antakya. She is the author of Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2002) and The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke University Press, 2012), both of which have also been published in Turkish translation. She is the co-editor of Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). And she is a co-convenor of the Archives of the Disappeared research network at the University of Cambridge.

Zeina Al Azmeh

Zeina Al Azmeh is a political sociologist at the University of Cambridge where she currently holds the positions of Centenary Research Fellow at Selwyn College, affiliated lecturer at the Department of Sociology and research associate at the Centre for Governance and Human Rights. Her work focuses on the political sociology of knowledge production and the cultural sociology of intellectuals in exile. More specifically, she specialises in the sociologies of knowledge production, migration, and memorialisation, with a focus on forced displacement caused by revolutions and counterrevolutions.

Zeina completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge in 2021, where she examined the role of exiled Syrian intellectuals in civil resistance. She is also trained as a musician with a bachelor’s degree in piano performance and a master’s degree in music composition.

Bonnie Greer

Bonnie Greer OBE FRSL is an American-British playwright, novelist, critic and broadcaster. She has lived in the UK since 1986 and has served on the boards of leading arts and cultural organisations including the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the London Film School. Her memoir A Parallel Life is published by Arcadia Books, and she is a regular contributor to The New European and ByLineTimes. She is currently writing a memoir about James Baldwin.

Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet, novelist and non-fiction writer with close links to Greece, India, and wildlife conservation. The poem she wrote for Dark Water Burning World, her collaboration with Issam Kourbaj honouring Syrian refugees to Lesbos in 2015, presented in Venice, Greece, Cambridge, London and New York, is included in her book of poems and prose on migration, We Are All from Somewhere Else (Vintage 2020).

Stefan Tarnowski

Stefan Tarnowski is an Early-Career Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a postdoctoral researcher on the ‘Views of Violence’ project at the University of Copenhagen. He completed his doctorate in October 2022 at Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and Center for Comparative Media. He’s working on his book manuscript, provisionally titled Struggling with Images: Revolution, War, and Media in Syria, and editing a book of collected essays on Abounaddara, the anonymous collective of filmmakers.

Wendy Pullan

Wendy Pullan is Professor Emerita of architecture and urban studies at the University of Cambridge, where she was founding director of the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research. Her research explores European and Middle Eastern architecture and cities, examining the processes of urban heritage, conflict, reconstruction and change – both historical and contemporary. Recent publications include: ‘Justice as the Urban Everyday’ (2019), ‘The disingenuous ‘clean-slate’: key concerns for reconstructing Ukraine’ (2024), ‘War by other means: Reconstruction in Syria’ (2024). She is currently writing a book about the nature of urban conflict.

Speakers also include:

Mezna Qato

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