Photo issue de la couverture de l'ouvrage Under the Same Sky. Everyday Politics of Religious Difference in Southern Turkey, Seçil Daǧtaș, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.
Memory and minorities in post-earthquake Antakya - Séminaire avec Seçil Daǧtaș
Responsables du séminaire : Thomas Pierret et Marine Poirier
Mardi 5 mai 2026, à 14h00, à la Mmsh (Aix-en-Provence), en salle A219, le séminaire de recherche de l'équipe Sciences sociales du contemporain accueillera Seçil Daǧtaș (Iméra/University of Waterloo) pour une intervention intiulée “Archiving Loss After a Catastrophe: Digital Memory Maps and Minority Witnessing in Post-Earthquake Antakya”.
When the February 2023 earthquakes destroyed Antakya in southern Turkey, the city’s minority communities turned to digital platforms to document what official narratives obscured — from the scale of human loss and the dispossession of minority residents to histories of coexistence at risk of erasure. This talk examines crowdsourced digital mapping initiatives that emerged in the aftermath as forms of post-disaster archiving and minority witnessing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative involvement in several of these efforts, I analyze how these projects mobilize distinct temporal and spatial logics in response to catastrophic loss, functioning as memorials and evidentiary repositories while also serving as platforms for community reassembly across dispersed geographies. Rather than simply preserving the past, they reactivate pre-earthquake lifeworlds, document ongoing loss, and contest state-produced absences through intimate knowledge and collective claim-making. The talk also attends to the politics of digitization, showing how digital archives depend on place-based memory, embodied knowledge, and community labor for their creation and survival, even as they enable marginalized voices to circulate beyond official channels. Moving beyond frameworks that treat minority archives primarily as sites of preservation or future repair, I reconceptualize archival labor in zones of catastrophe as a multitemporal practice operating across retrospective, immediate, and anticipatory registers.
Seçil Dağtaș is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and currently a Region Sud/Iméra Chair in Germaine Tillion : demain, la Méditerranée in Marseille. She is the author of Under the Same Sky: Everyday Politics of Religious Difference in Southern Turkey (Penn Press, 2025) and numerous articles published in venues such as Cultural Anthropology, Social Politics, Geopolitics, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Her research examines gender, religion, and everyday sociality across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, exploring how urban coexistence, border dynamics, and solidarities generate alternative political imaginaries beyond state-centered frameworks.
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