Seçil Dağtaș
Biographic Data
| ID | 127355 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Seçil Dağtaș |
| GIVEN NAMES | Seçil |
| FAMILY NAME | Dağtaș |
| SIGNATURE | DAĞTAȘ S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Waterloo |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8037-9855 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Nested Borders
Cyprus’ 2004 accession to the European Union (EU) transformed the significance of the ‘Green Line’ – the United Nations (UN)-monitored buffer zone that has separated Turkish and Greek Cypriots since the island’s 1974 partition. Today, this zone serves as a de facto external EU border, dividing the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) from the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). This paper adopts a multiscalar approach to study the geopol…
Transversal Community-Building
This article addresses the transversal dimensions of community-building in the European migration context that are responses to refugees' inadequate access to rights and resources. The main argument is that women-led community-building underlines how women refugees and women volunteers supporting refugees engage their agency to foster dialogue, collaboration, and solidarity across power imbalances and social differences. We refer to these process…
Borderland Porosities
This article focuses on displaced peoples’ migratory journeys to the borderlands of Lebanon and Turkey. Building on a selection of ethnographic, interview, policy, and programme materials, it advances the argument that Syrian encounters with these borderlands encompass multidirectional movements and context-specific and fluid processes imbricated in relations of power that often stimulate migrant politics, processes that involve, what we term, bo…
The Contradictory Syrian Presence in Turkey’s Southern Borderlands
The displacement of Syrians into Turkey is approaching its twelfth year, but the conditions of Syrian presence in the country are still fraught with ambivalence. The dramatic changes in migration and border dynamics and the instrumentalization of Syrian migrants in Turkish politics have intensified racially motivated animosity. Yet in border provinces where Syrians are densely concentrated, popular attitudes toward them operate on other axes, whi…
Distant Toleration”
This article examines the politics of solidarity with and among refugee women in Turkey’s southern borderlands. Drawing on ethnographic research in Hatay, we focus on Syrian- and Turkish-led women’s organizations, whose solidarity work contextually entangles organized acts of care and support with social hierarchies, tensions, and mutual distance. These gendered social spaces complicate the scholarly critiques of depoliticization in refugee assis…
The Civilizations Choir of Antakya
This article examines the politics of minority representation focusing on the Civilizations Choir of Antakya, a multireligious ensemble formed in the mid-2000s against the backdrop of Turkey's democratization process and involvement in globally funded programs of intercultural dialogue. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the choir's hometown, Antakya, near Turkey's border with Syria, I compare the experiences of Arabic-speaking religious groups w…
Sex and Secularism
Book Review| November 01 2019 Sex and Secularism Sex and Secularism. Scott, Joan Wallach. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 256pages. isbn 9780691160641. Seçil Dağtaş Seçil Dağtaş SEÇIL DAĞTAŞ is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and former research fellow at the Collegium de Lyon. Contact: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Middle East Women's…
Diary or Notebook
Unlike the majority of Muslim countries in which family disputes are resolved either through personal status laws or in the wider sphere of sharia courts, Turkey commits to a secular civil code in its conduct with the family. The daily operation of Turkish secular law, however, is just as predicated as religion-based laws upon morally charged ideas of personhood and their gendered ambivalences. Contrary to analyses that approach this phenomenon a…
Nationalism, displacement, and ethnoreligious differentiation in Turkey’s southern borderlands
Inhabiting Difference across Religion and Gender
The global refugee crisis gives new urgency to questions of gender and religion in contexts of displacement. This article adopts and contributes to an intersectional feminist reading of gendered displacement by examining the daily lives of a diverse group of displaced Syrian women at the southern borderlands of Turkey, a country hosting the world's largest population of refugees today. I argue that the vernaculars of hospitality and border crossi…
Whosemisafirs?negotiating Difference Along the Turkish-Syrian Border
This article examines the figure of the misafir (guest) as it personifies the combined domains of everyday and institutional hospitality in Hatay, a contested border province annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, and home today to over 400,000 displaced Syrians. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2012 in Hatay's administrative capital, Antakya, I focus on the perspectives of the region's bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish…
Whosemisafirs?negotiating Difference Along the Turkish-Syrian Border
This article examines the figure of the misafir (guest) as it personifies the combined domains of everyday and institutional hospitality in Hatay, a contested border province annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, and home today to over 400,000 displaced Syrians. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2012 in Hatay's administrative capital, Antakya, I focus on the perspectives of the region's bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish…
Inhabiting Difference across Religion and Gender
The global refugee crisis gives new urgency to questions of gender and religion in contexts of displacement. This article adopts and contributes to an intersectional feminist reading of gendered displacement by examining the daily lives of a diverse group of displaced Syrian women at the southern borderlands of Turkey, a country hosting the world's largest population of refugees today. I argue that the vernaculars of hospitality and border crossi…
The Civilizations Choir of Antakya
This article examines the politics of minority representation focusing on the Civilizations Choir of Antakya, a multireligious ensemble formed in the mid-2000s against the backdrop of Turkey's democratization process and involvement in globally funded programs of intercultural dialogue. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the choir's hometown, Antakya, near Turkey's border with Syria, I compare the experiences of Arabic-speaking religious groups w…
Borderland Porosities
This article focuses on displaced peoples’ migratory journeys to the borderlands of Lebanon and Turkey. Building on a selection of ethnographic, interview, policy, and programme materials, it advances the argument that Syrian encounters with these borderlands encompass multidirectional movements and context-specific and fluid processes imbricated in relations of power that often stimulate migrant politics, processes that involve, what we term, bo…
Distant Toleration”
This article examines the politics of solidarity with and among refugee women in Turkey’s southern borderlands. Drawing on ethnographic research in Hatay, we focus on Syrian- and Turkish-led women’s organizations, whose solidarity work contextually entangles organized acts of care and support with social hierarchies, tensions, and mutual distance. These gendered social spaces complicate the scholarly critiques of depoliticization in refugee assis…
Diary or Notebook
Unlike the majority of Muslim countries in which family disputes are resolved either through personal status laws or in the wider sphere of sharia courts, Turkey commits to a secular civil code in its conduct with the family. The daily operation of Turkish secular law, however, is just as predicated as religion-based laws upon morally charged ideas of personhood and their gendered ambivalences. Contrary to analyses that approach this phenomenon a…
Nationalism, displacement, and ethnoreligious differentiation in Turkey’s southern borderlands
Whosemisafirs?negotiating Difference Along the Turkish-Syrian Border
This article examines the figure of the misafir (guest) as it personifies the combined domains of everyday and institutional hospitality in Hatay, a contested border province annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, and home today to over 400,000 displaced Syrians. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2012 in Hatay's administrative capital, Antakya, I focus on the perspectives of the region's bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish…
Nationalism, displacement, and ethnoreligious differentiation in Turkey’s southern borderlands
Inhabiting Difference across Religion and Gender
The global refugee crisis gives new urgency to questions of gender and religion in contexts of displacement. This article adopts and contributes to an intersectional feminist reading of gendered displacement by examining the daily lives of a diverse group of displaced Syrian women at the southern borderlands of Turkey, a country hosting the world's largest population of refugees today. I argue that the vernaculars of hospitality and border crossi…
Sex and Secularism
Book Review| November 01 2019 Sex and Secularism Sex and Secularism. Scott, Joan Wallach. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 256pages. isbn 9780691160641. Seçil Dağtaş Seçil Dağtaş SEÇIL DAĞTAŞ is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and former research fellow at the Collegium de Lyon. Contact: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Middle East Women's…
Diary or Notebook
Unlike the majority of Muslim countries in which family disputes are resolved either through personal status laws or in the wider sphere of sharia courts, Turkey commits to a secular civil code in its conduct with the family. The daily operation of Turkish secular law, however, is just as predicated as religion-based laws upon morally charged ideas of personhood and their gendered ambivalences. Contrary to analyses that approach this phenomenon a…
The Civilizations Choir of Antakya
This article examines the politics of minority representation focusing on the Civilizations Choir of Antakya, a multireligious ensemble formed in the mid-2000s against the backdrop of Turkey's democratization process and involvement in globally funded programs of intercultural dialogue. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the choir's hometown, Antakya, near Turkey's border with Syria, I compare the experiences of Arabic-speaking religious groups w…
Distant Toleration”
This article examines the politics of solidarity with and among refugee women in Turkey’s southern borderlands. Drawing on ethnographic research in Hatay, we focus on Syrian- and Turkish-led women’s organizations, whose solidarity work contextually entangles organized acts of care and support with social hierarchies, tensions, and mutual distance. These gendered social spaces complicate the scholarly critiques of depoliticization in refugee assis…
The Contradictory Syrian Presence in Turkey’s Southern Borderlands
The displacement of Syrians into Turkey is approaching its twelfth year, but the conditions of Syrian presence in the country are still fraught with ambivalence. The dramatic changes in migration and border dynamics and the instrumentalization of Syrian migrants in Turkish politics have intensified racially motivated animosity. Yet in border provinces where Syrians are densely concentrated, popular attitudes toward them operate on other axes, whi…
Borderland Porosities
This article focuses on displaced peoples’ migratory journeys to the borderlands of Lebanon and Turkey. Building on a selection of ethnographic, interview, policy, and programme materials, it advances the argument that Syrian encounters with these borderlands encompass multidirectional movements and context-specific and fluid processes imbricated in relations of power that often stimulate migrant politics, processes that involve, what we term, bo…
Nested Borders
Cyprus’ 2004 accession to the European Union (EU) transformed the significance of the ‘Green Line’ – the United Nations (UN)-monitored buffer zone that has separated Turkish and Greek Cypriots since the island’s 1974 partition. Today, this zone serves as a de facto external EU border, dividing the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) from the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). This paper adopts a multiscalar approach to study the geopol…
Transversal Community-Building
This article addresses the transversal dimensions of community-building in the European migration context that are responses to refugees' inadequate access to rights and resources. The main argument is that women-led community-building underlines how women refugees and women volunteers supporting refugees engage their agency to foster dialogue, collaboration, and solidarity across power imbalances and social differences. We refer to these process…
Political science (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (5 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (4 works)