GWSS graduate student Mediha Sorma has been awarded one of only two Pre-Doctoral Sawyer Seminar fellowships for the next academic year, 2020-2021. Next year's Sawyer seminar is titled "Humanitarianism: Migrations and Care Through the Global South," and is being led by Cabieri Robinson and Arzoo Osanloo. The year-long seminar will be looking at alternative histories of humanitarianism and genealogies of care (for the stranger) to those of the western Judeo-Christian secular order that emerge from societies in the global South, such as Turkey, which has the largest number of refugees in the world currently.
Mediha will be in residence at the Simpson Center for the year, participating in the exciting bi-weekly seminar, where she will also present on her work about modern Turkey's racial and settler-colonial state and Kurdish subaltern practices of care and mothering for the dead and the living as a genealogy of settler state's long history of siege.