Hybrid lecture by Burcu Bugu, Ph.D, UCLA Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Scholar.
Friday, May 15, 2026
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Pleas click here to participate via the Zoom Webinar platform.
This talk examines everyday life, memory, and governance in Dersim (Tunceli, Turkey), a mountainous enclave located between the southern tip of the Armenian highlands and the upper Mesopotamian steppes. Shaped by layered histories of violence and political transformation, the region offers a critical site for understanding how the past continues to structure the present—not only through memory, but through everyday practices, spatial arrangements, and forms of attention.
Focusing on state institutions, tourism, and daily encounters, the talk traces how different identities are differentially rendered visible. While Alevi identity is selectively incorporated and reframed as cultural heritage, Armenian presence, despite its deep historical roots, often appears indirectly through silence, omission, and hesitation.
Bringing together sites of representation and everyday interaction, the talk shows that governance in Dersim operates not only through force, but through the organization of perception and expression. In doing so, it offers an approach to the afterlives of violence as embedded in the textures of everyday life.
Speaker:
Burcu Bugu is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Promise Armenian Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD in Anthropology from UCLA. Her research examines state power and everyday life in contemporary Turkey through ethnographic fieldwork, with particular attention to questions of memory, place, and political subjectivity. She is currently developing a book manuscript based on her doctoral research, alongside an ongoing project on Alevized Armenians.
Introduction:
Salih Can Aciksoz is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he also holds affiliations with Gender Studies and the Interdisciplinary Program in Disability Studies. His multi-award-winning book “Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey” (University of California Press, 2020) chronicles the post-injury lives and political activism of the disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war. His new project “Humanitarian Borderlands” focuses on political contests over medical humanitarianism along and across the Turkish-Kurdish-Syrian border. In addition to these long-term projects, Aciksoz has also written on trauma, assisted reproduction, LGBTIQ+ parenting, non-lethal technologies, prenatal genetic testing, authoritarian populism, and feminist and queer resistance in journals including Current Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Men and Masculinities, and Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.
Parking
Parking at UCLA requires a valid permit at all times. Campus parking is available 24 hours a day at varying prices. The nearest parking to the event venue is UCLA Parking Structure 3 (P3). P3 rates: $5.00 - $17.00 (1 hour - all day). Visit UCLA Visitor Parking for information about how to pay.
Once you arrive at Bunche Hall's elevators (located near the building's support columns), head to the 10th floor, make a right when exiting the elevator, and a sign will direct you to the room.
We recommend you arrive 15 minutes early for parking.
Please note: This event will be photographed and recorded for documentation and distribution. All audience members agree to the possibility of appearing in these photographs and recordings by virtue of attending the event or participating in the event.
Sponsor(s): The Promise Armenian Institute, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Anthropology, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), Ararat-Eskijian Museum