Cultural Studies Speaker Series: Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim

Ecofeminist and Animist Constellations of Humanist Inquiry: “Emplaced Humanities”

This talk explores possibilities of research in the humanities beyond the traditional methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary orientations of the modernist era. İbrişim refers to the implications of ecofeminist and animist scholarship in the humanities across a broad interdisciplinary range for discussing what she calls the “emplaced humanities method.” In so doing, she invites voices, material objects, intellectual and philosophical traditions, and epistemological and ontological entanglement with the disciplinary field of the humanities.

In this context, this talk investigates ecofeminist and animist humanistic inquiry. While keeping in mind of the patterns of exclusion of the sexualized, racialized and naturalized “others” that were not recognized as belonging to humanity, my particular attention is devoted to perspectives emerging from Indigenous and local epistemologies. This talk advocates for the efforts to think beyond anthropocentrism while it seeks to expand the notion
of subjectivity into an embodied, embedded, relational and affective assembly interconnected with human and nonhuman entities for discussing the “emplaced humanities method.” To that end, I will offer cultural and literary examples from postcolonial Asian, African, and Middle Eastern contexts.

BIO: 

Dr. Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (MSCA Fellow) at Sabancı University. She serves as an official management committee member for Turkey in the Cost Action Project: CA20105 - Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change (2021-2025). As a recipient of Fulbright PhD Scholarship, she completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Washington University. Before pursing her PhD, she worked as a senior lecturer at ITU School of Foreign Languages (2002-2014). As a comparatist literary scholar, Gündoğan İbrişim specializes in cultural trauma and memory studies, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial theory, 20th and 21st century novel, ecofeminism, and environmental humanities. She is the co-author of Gaflet: Modern Türkçe Edebiyatın Cinsiyetçi Sinir Uçları (Metis, 2019). Her work has appeared in journals such as European Review, The Journal of World Literature, INTERTEXTS, Monograf, Notos, Varlık, Birikim, as well as edited volumes including The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma; Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film; Women’s Subaltern Studies; Mapping World, Anglophone Studies; Ekoloji, Bir Arada Yaşamın Geleceği; Feminist Eleştiri: Arayışlar ve Müzakereler. Gündoğan İbrişim is currently working on her monograph on the poetics and politics of ecological witnessing in Anglophone world literatures (under contract with Routledge, Routledge Comparative Literature series).