Laurent Dissard

My Blog

  • Sites of Memory, Sites of Loss

    Sites of Memory, Sites of Loss

    The 2022 Keyman Annual Conference examined heritage as a political process shaped by memory, loss, and power in Turkey and post-Ottoman lands, bringing together interdisciplinary scholars to address archaeology, urban transformation, and cultural dispossession. Read more

  • Intangible Heritage in Béarn

    Intangible Heritage in Béarn

    I had the immense pleasure of coordinating from November 8th to November 12th, 2021, alongside the anthropologist Patricia Heiniger-Casteret at the University of Pau and Pays de l’Adour, one of the first UNITA Winter Schools on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Pays de Béarn. Living and contemporary, Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) includes practices, representations, expressions, knowledge… Read more

  • “Protected with the utmost care”

    “Protected with the utmost care”

    The Ilısu Dam and Hydroelectric Power Plant was officially inaugurated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on May 19, 2020. Turkey’s fourth-largest dam is part of the Southeast Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi or GAP), a development project implemented in 1984 to improve the economic and social conditions of the country’s impoverished, mostly Kurdish, southeastern… Read more

  • Guerres de Syrie et dynamiques kurdes – Congrès des études sur le Moyen-Orient et les mondes musulmans

    Guerres de Syrie et dynamiques kurdes – Congrès des études sur le Moyen-Orient et les mondes musulmans

    Les dix ans du conflit en Syrie sont l’occasion de faire un état des lieux des usages de la « question kurde » au Moyen-Orient. Ces années de destructions sont aussi le moment de reconstructions : dans ce sens, cet atelier sur les conflits syriens et les dynamiques kurdes (2011-2021) souhaite avant tout interroger le… Read more

  • Home(land)s: Place, Loss and Return in Contemporary Turkey

    Home(land)s: Place, Loss and Return in Contemporary Turkey

    Home(land)s: Place, Loss and Return in Contemporary Turkey (Volume 13 of Études arméniennes contemporaines) approaches home and homeland as unstable, affective, and epistemic problems shaped by violence, displacement, and denial. Bringing together interdisciplinary research on contemporary Turkey, the volume examines how loss, return, and belonging are lived, narrated, and governed in the afterlives of mass… Read more