Dr. Hayal Akarsu

Assistant Professor
Cultural Anthropology
h.akarsu@uu.nl

PRESENTATIONS (partial list)

 

Invited Talks

Force Experts: Standardization and Police Reforms in Turkey, Annual Chair’s Lecture, Department of Anthropology, Rice University, 10/2021.

 

Everyday Politics of Security: From Police Reform to Environmental Crime, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University, 6/2021. 

 

Force Experts: Afterlives of Police Reforms in Turkey, Department of Anthropology, Smith College, 5/2021.

 

“An Iron Fist in A Velvet Glove”: An Ethnography of Police Reforms in Turkey, International Studies Program, College of Charleston, 3/2021.

 

Remaking Security and the Social in Turkey, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Özyegin University, 3/2021.

 

“An Iron Fist in A Velvet Glove”: Afterlives of Police Reforms in Turkey, Middle East and North African Studies (MENAS) Colloquium Series, University of Arizona, 2/2021.

 

Force Experts: Police Reform, Transnational Expertise, and the Securitization of Everyday Life in Turkey, Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research, University of Bremen, 1/2021.

 

“An Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove”: Police Reform and the Securitization of Everyday Life in Turkey, Department of Anthropology, Wesleyan University, 12/2020.

 

Citizen Forces: Topologies of Policing and Afterlives of Reform in Turkey, Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, 11/2018.

 

Invited Roundtables & Workshops

Discipline and Punish: Law, Policing and Incarceration in the Middle East, Middle East Center, University of Pennsylvania (UPENN), 10/2021.

 

‘Police Reform Tourism’, Plural Dimensions of Policing Oversight, Department of Anthropology, Utrecht University, 10/2021.

 

Data Sovereignty and Digital Policing, Platform Dispossession: Situating Infrastructures of Urban Inequality Across Digital and Spatial Formations, University of Chicago, Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, 8/2021.

 

The Police and Accountability Group Workshops (Scientific Member), Transnational Trends in Citizenship: Authoritarianism and the Emerging Global Culture of Resistance Project, The Century Foundation, New York, 2021-2022.   

 

Digital Footprint in Remote Fieldwork. Fieldwork in the Time of Covid: Challenges and Opportunities, ME Special Event/AAA, 10/2020.

 

Field Research in the Middle East during and after the Pandemic, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, 10/2020.

 

The Spectacular and the Ordinary: Ethnographies of Police and Crime in the Global South, Measures and Meanings of Crime and Justice in the Global South, School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, 10/2018.

 

What Counts as Evidence of the Affective? Affect, Politics, and the Law, Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Workshop, 11/2017.

 

Policing the Police: Law, Reform and Questions of Impunity in Turkey, Law and Politics in Turkey: Reform, Authority and Emergency, Buffett Institute for Global Studies, Northwestern University, 10/2017.  

 

‘Social Policing’: Remaking Security and the Social in Turkey, Understanding Turkey: Vision, Revision, and the Future, The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Stanford University, 4/2017.

 

Panels Organized 

“Ends of Policing? Anthropological Perspectives on Police Abolition,” Raising Our Voices, American Anthropological Association Meeting, 11/2020 (curated and sponsored by the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology). 

 

“Politics and Anti-Politics of Care in Turkey,” Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, 10/2020.

 

Turkey’s Post-Election Climate: Anthropology of Authoritarian Politics and Struggles for Justice, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, 11/2019 (late-breaking session).

 

Anthropology’s ‘Repugnant Others’, American Ethnological Society Meeting, 3/2019.

 

Making of Law and Order: Documents, Experts, and Reporting, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, 11/2018.

 

Anthropology of Police: Techno-Politics, Reform, and Questions of Violence, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, 11/2017.

 

Conference Presentations

Suffocating Care: Police as Social Workers in Turkey, Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, 10/2020.

 

Suffocating Care, European Association of Social Anthropologists, 7/2020.

 

Afterlives of Police Reform: Informing, Complicity, and Citizen-Police Subjects in Turkey, Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting American, 11/2019.

 

Digital Policing: Techno-optimism, Surveillance, and Political Subjectivity in the ‘Digital Age,’ American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, 4/2019.

 

Citizen Forces: Vigilantism and the Authoritarian Afterlives of Police Reform in Turkey, Critical Theories in a Global Context: Fascism? Populism? Democracy?, University of Brighton, UK, 1/2019.

 

Becoming a Force Expert: The Force-Resistance Diagram and Police Impunity in Turkey, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, 11/2018.   

 

Untold Stories of the Middle East, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, 9/2018.

 

‘The Lone Ethnographer’ in the Police World: Critical Tools for Studying Policing, American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, 4/2018.

 

‘Social Policing’ and the Remaking of Security and Violence in Turkey, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, 11/2017.   

 

Technopolitics of Security Governance: Recalibrating Police Violence in Turkey, Security in the Anthropocene: The Peripheries of Order, Annual Meeting of Society for Social Studies of Science, 8/2017.

 

Exposing the Regimes of Truth and Evidence in “New Turkey” (roundtable), American Ethnological Society Spring Conference, 4/2017.