Burcu Ozdemir Demir

BURCU OZDEMIR DEMIR, then a graduate student at City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in October 2022 to aid research on “Affective Ecologies: The Political Life of Water in Northern Kurdistan.” Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this dissertation examines the entanglement of war, hydroelectric dam projects, and ecologies in Northern Kurdistan. Due to its mountainous geography with rivers running through deep valleys, Northern Kurdistan’s landscape has always been perceived as a central threat by the Turkish state. Especially since the 1990s, with the impact of the war, the ecological destruction of the region became more systematic. Controlling the rivers by constructing dams has turned into a military strategy in the hands of the state. Focusing on the Tigris River and its tributaries, this dissertation traces the processes through which infrastructures and ecologies are coproduced in an ongoing war and the ways in which ecologies enable, extend, and resist enduring violence. Taking the river both as an object and an actor in the unfolding of relations, it seeks to answer how water materializes as state power, becomes the terrain of dispossession, and functions as a sign of belonging or loss in different moments. Accordingly, it argues, as that which is both controlled, and uncontrollable, by human and state forces, the water becomes an emblem of and vehicle for the violence and limits of colonial and national power.