The centennial of the 1923 exchange between Muslims in Greece and the Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. To commemorate, various events have been organized to address the exchange from different perspectives, such as the lens of the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic and/or the Lausanne Convention, or the cultural memory of the exchanged populations. This talk will situate the legacies of this exchange in the contemporary world context, and consider the politics of memory by questioning what the "commemoration" of the exchange entails in the "civilizationist" present.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Middle Eastern Studies Forum, and CDDRL's Program on Turkey.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Aslı Iğsız is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her research interests include political violence, eugenics, humanism, spatial segregation and forced migration, and cultural policy. Her first book Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford University Press) was published in 2018. Humanism in Ruins sought to offer a critique of liberalism from the angle of the management of difference, and explored the underlying racialized logics of population transfers, partitions, segregation, apartheid, and border walls. Currently she is working on a new project on the notion of civilizationism in the contemporary world context. Iğsız was previously a member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Language is the basis of humanity and literature as well as the basis of freedom. If these are separated from each other, not only one but all of them will be in danger. While literature brings people together with language and freedom, it also gives the opportunity to see people and society with new eyes. That's why even the simplest work of art can sometimes be seen as a great danger by the authorities, because it carries a gem in its core, which can be realized as one digs into the ground.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Middle Eastern Studies Forum, and CDDRL's Program on Turkey.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Burhan Sönmez is the author of six novels. He is president of PEN International and a Senior Member of Hughes Hall College and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His novels have been translated into forty eight languages and received international prizes, including the EBRD Literature Prize and Vaclav Havel Library Award. He was born in Turkey and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer in Istanbul before going to Britain for political reasons and living there in exile for several years. He has been on the judging panel of several events, including Inge Feltrinelli Prize and Geneva International Film Festival and written for press such as La Repubblica, Der Spiegel and The Guardian. He has translated the poetry book of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake into Turkish. Having written five novels in Turkish, he began to write in his mother tongue, Kurdish, with his last novel Lovers of Franz K. He lives between Cambridge and Istanbul.

Turkey held its municipal elections on March 31, 2024. Beyond their immediate importance for local governance, addressing issues such as urban spaces and environmental challenges, these elections hold broader significance for the challenge of democracy in a nation that has been grappling with competitive authoritarianism for a while. Nowhere is this significance more pronounced than in the race for Istanbul's mayorship. Istanbul, being the commercial and cultural heart of Turkey, witnessed a landmark double victory by the opposition candidate five years ago, shaking the economic infrastructure of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)'s governance model. What do these elections signify for the future of democracy, at both local and national levels, in Turkey? Stanford scholars on Turkey will engage in a dialogue with Gönül Tol to explore the implications of the March 31 local elections.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Middle Eastern Studies Forum, and CDDRL's Program on Turkey.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gönül Tol is the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program and a senior fellow with the Black Sea Program. She is the author of Erdoğan's War: A Strongman's Struggle at Home and in Syria. She has taught courses at George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies and at the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University on Turkey, Islamist movements in Western Europe, world politics, and the Middle East. She has written extensively on Turkey-U.S. relations, Turkish domestic and foreign policy, and the Kurdish issue. She is a frequent media commentator.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on April 9th from Noon–1PM Pacific with speaker Ronald E. Robertson for Disentangling User Choice and Algorithmic Curation in Online Systems. The session will be moderated by Jeff Hancock, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the Spring Seminar Series, a series spanning April through June hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. Sessions will take place in Encina Commons, Moghadam Room 123, 615 Crothers Way on Stanford Campus.

Widespread concerns about the systems that mediate our access to online information are often discussed in metaphorically compelling but operationally limited terms. Among the most prominent of such concerns, are the loosely defined concepts known as echo chambers, filter bubbles, and rabbit holes, all of which focus on the role that online systems play in spreading partisan, unreliable, or extremist information. In this talk Robertson examines how these concepts, and concerns about the impact of online systems more broadly, can be better understood and measured in terms of user choice (what people do) and algorithmic curation (what people see). To do so, he provides an overview of research that examines user choice and algorithmic curation in isolation and under controlled conditions, as well as recent research that examines how humans and algorithms interact under ecological conditions. Robertson will also discuss the implications that the findings from these studies have for researchers and policy makers, the challenges presented by new and ever-evolving systems for accessing online information, and the need for independent, ongoing, and long-term research to better understand how people interact with online systems.

About the Speaker

Ronald designs experiments and software to study the ways in which humans and algorithms interact in digital spaces, especially as they pertain to online information seeking. He is currently a research scientist at the Stanford Internet Observatory and obtained his PhD in Network Science from Northeastern University, where he was advised by Christo Wilson, a computer scientist, and David Lazer, a political scientist. His research aims to help us better understand the intersection of user choice, algorithmic curation, and choice architecture in online platforms including web search engines and social media sites and has been published in top journals, including Nature, Science Advances, PNAS, and in conference proceedings, such as the Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, the Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), and Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM).

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's pugnacious president, is now the country's longest-serving leader. On his way to the top, he has fought many wars. This book tells the story of those battles against domestic enemies through the lens of the Syrian conflict, which has become part and parcel of Erdoğan's fight to remain in power.

Turkey expert Gönül Tol traces Erdoğan's ideological evolution from a conservative democrat to an Islamist and a Turkish nationalist, and explores how this progression has come to shape his Syria policy, changing the course of the war. She paints a vivid picture of the president's constantly shifting strategy to consolidate his rule, showing that these shifts have transformed Turkey's role in post-uprising Syria from an advocate of democracy, to a power fanning the flames of civil war, to an occupier.

From the first days of Erdoğan's rule through the failed coup against him, via the Kurdish peace process, the Arab uprisings and the refugee crisis, this compelling, authoritative book tells the story of one man's quest to remain in power--tying together the fates of two countries, and changing them both forever.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Middle Eastern Studies Forum, and CDDRL's Program on Turkey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gönül Tol is the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program and a senior fellow with the Black Sea Program. She is the author of Erdogan's War: A Strongman's Struggle at Home and in Syria. She has taught courses at George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies and at the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University on Turkey, Islamist movements in Western Europe, world politics, and the Middle East.She has written extensively on Turkey-U.S. relations, Turkish domestic politics, and foreign policy and the Kurdish issue. She is a frequent media commentator.

Image

This talk examines the concept of aesthetic perfection against the backdrop of today’s digital mediascape, where the latest screen technologies promise sharp, pristine images with lossless compression and a lifelike appearance. While, in Hito Steyerl’s account, the circulation of “poor” or “imperfect” images can disrupt hegemonic media logics, I demonstrate that the very ideal of perfection is an engine of semantic instability in the modern age. Intervening in contemporary debates about “rich” and “poor” images, and “high” and “low” definition, my lecture offers a differentiated and historically dynamic understanding of perfection as a limit concept in global film and media theory. I argue that moving images played a crucial role in the redefinition of perfection, as classical conceptions of the term gradually and unevenly gave way to perfectionism, perfectibility, and an aesthetics of imperfection. Integrating Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history into the study of moving images, my talk reconceives the history of global film and media theory as one of semantic persistence, change, and radical novelty of meaning.

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) and co-editor of three volumes: The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016), Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

This event is hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center and co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on May 7th from Noon–1PM Pacific with speaker Olivier Blazy, of Ecole Polytechnique, for Online Age Verification and Privacy Protection: An Impossible Equation? The session will be moderated by Florence G'sell of the Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the Spring Seminar Series, a series spanning April through June hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. Sessions will take place in Encina Commons, Moghadam Room 123, 615 Crothers Way on Stanford Campus.

The internet, often described as a vast and unruly wilderness, presents a universal challenge: maintaining safety and order. A key concern is the protection of children online, specifically through restricting their access to sensitive content. Various methods of online age verification have been attempted, ranging from highly intrusive techniques to those that are less effective.

In this presentation, Blazy will delve into the common pitfalls associated with traditional age verification methods both in term of safety, and security, and will then introduce a new framework developed in collaboration with the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) and PEReN. This framework utilizes readily available technologies and offers a practical implementation approach. Finally Blazy will discuss how this proof of concept not only addresses specific challenges but also aligns with current legislative measures, and expectations while contributing to a safer and more privacy-friendly digital environment. 

About the Speaker

Professor at Ecole Polytechnique, and leader of their newest Cybersecurity program, Olivier Blazy has worked in the field of cryptography for 15 years from a PhD on zero-knowledge and implicits proofs of knowledge to post quantum cryptosystems and study of real-work schemes for secure end-to-end communications. He was involved in several major projects on identity-based cryptography, and post-quantum cryptography, which lead to several submission to the NIST standardization process, including 2 (of the 3) alternative finalists. Recently, he worked with the french Data Protection Authority (CNIL) on an age verification proof of concept to serve as a baseline for guidance of new french (and hopefully european) legislation. Before joining Ecole Polytechnique as a Professor, Olivier was an assistant professor in University of Limoges, and did a post doctorate in Germany.Throughout his career, he worked with several companies and government entities to bridge the gap between cutting-edge academic cryptography and practical deployment to help solve complex challenges in securing digital communications.