In this webinar, Nazan Üstündağ will present on her recently published book, The Mother, the Politician, the Guerilla: Women's Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement (Fordham University Press, 2023). Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of, including its matter, relationality, temporality, and spatiality. In conversation with feminist political theory, psychoanalysis, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Decolonial Studies, the book seeks to establish what the movement offers as a provocation for contemporary politics.

About the Speaker

Nazan Üstündağ is a sociologist and feminist scholar. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Indiana University Bloomington. Between 2005 and 2018, Üstündağ worked as an Assistant Professor at Boğaziçi University, Department of Sociology. Since 2018, she was affiliated with the Transregionale Studien in Berlin as an Academy in Exile and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund fellow and the Gerda Henkel Foundation Patrimonies program. Üstündağ's work concerns political imaginaries, gendered subjectivities and state violence in Kurdistan. Her most recent articles appeared in the journals South Atlantic Quarterly, History of the Present and Differences. She is a member of Women for Peace and Academics for Peace.

Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of Gender Studies, UCLA Center for the Study of Women