Social Movement Workshop: Maria Valdovinos and Gülay Kilicaslan

An intercampus exchange of advanced social movement scholarship

Friday, March 25, 2022 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM EDT
Online (Zoom)

Friday, March 25, 2022 at 2:00 pm (EST)

Presenters: Gülay Kilicaslan (York University) and Maria Valdovinos (George Mason University)

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Join us for a discussion on cutting-edge research carried out by advanced PhD students, faculty, postdocs, and movement-based activist scholars. This workshop is a new collaborative exchange between academic institutions with specialties in social movement research.

Presenter: Gülay Kilicaslan

Gülay Kilicaslan is a Ph.D. candidate and a doctoral fellow at the Global Digital Citizenship Lab in the Department of Sociology at York University. She is also a FFVT research fellow at the Bonn International Center for Conflict Studies. Her writings on Kurdish forced migrants, Kurdish political movement, migrant agency, gender-based online violence and digital feminist activism have appeared in scholarly edited books and journals.

"Deprovincializing Kurdish Contentious Politics: Forced Migration, Politics of Scale and Activism across Kurdistan, Turkey, and Europe"

In this paper, I examine how forced displacement influences the dynamics of political mobilization in Kurdish contentious politics by focusing on the two most recent episodes of mass displacement of Kurds (the 1990s and the mid-2010s) that were carried out by the Turkish state. Drawing on qualitative interviews with activists as well as fieldwork study in Northern Kurdistan, Turkey, France, Germany, and Switzerland, I will discuss the role of forced displacement in transforming the dynamics of contentious politics and the politics of scale in the processes of actors’ mobilization in a settler-colonial context. In this paper, I will demonstrate the centrality of the issue of displacement and migrant activism for anti-colonial social movements in achieving scale shift, self-rule, and decolonization. In doing so, I will argue that forced displacement acts as a catalyst in Kurdish political movement by forging new political subjectivities, through which migrants establish trans-local networks, create novel resources and repertoires of action, and develop new forms of political organizing. By centring actors’ accounts and agency, challenging methodological nationalism, and analyzing forced migrants’ contentious strategies as well as their spatial constitutions, this paper will provide a nuanced account of forced migration that is often studied in the context of marginalization and victimization in forced migration studies.

Presenter: Maria Valdovinos

Maria Valdovinos Olson is a doctoral candidate in public sociology at George Mason University and a member of the Movement Engaged research hub at the Center for Social Science Research. Her dissertation is entitled “The Care Promise: The Paradox of Care in Criminal Legal Reform and Prisoner Reentry in the Era of Decarceration and Movement Toward Abolition.” Currently, she is collecting data to address the question of how existing and envisioned social systems and social policies can best organize the provision of care for the formerly incarcerated under a larger paradigmatic shift from punishment-oriented responses to care-oriented ones. This research is in dialogue with the discourses of the decarceration and abolitionist movements.

"From Mass Incarceration to Decarceration and Abolition: Historical Underpinnings, Imagined Futures, and the Care Promise"

In this discussion, I explore what I refer to as "the paradox of care" in criminal legal reform. Since the era of mass incarceration the carceral state has been known for its punitive excesses. Recent protests including those in the wake of George Floyd’s murder have called on care as the cure to punishment, an idea I refer to as the care promise. Encapsulated in chants such as “care not cops,” and “care not cages” the idea of care as cure-all to the excesses of punishment has continued to gain traction. However, the birth of the prison itself was at one point a reformist move towards a more humane and gentler means of punishment than that offered by the spectacle of torture under sovereign rule. Over the years the pendulum between punishment and care has swung continually. Yet, while punishment scholars and sociologists have contributed much to our understanding of how punishment is organized in society, the concept of care has received much less sustained attention. Of consequence is the fact that implementation of care ethics is highly sensitive to context and in particular, the web of relationships that comprise that context. Using the case and context of prisoner reentry, I consider and discuss the implications for movement goals seeking to design institutions, policies, and systems that are care oriented.