We're excited to announce the recipient of the January round of our student research grant awards!
Eylem Delikanlı’s work focuses on the 1980 Coup D’Etat, a pivotal moment in the history of Turkey. Her research project based on oral history, “Left Behind”, elaborates on the narratives of political activists and revolutionists of the 1970’s and their families in Turkey. The scope of the work was initially limited to individuals and their families from various political groups of the left who were directly targeted by the Turkish Military informs of torture, forced disappearances, exile, execution and imprisonment during and after the Coup. Using the collection of life stories, Eylem co-authored the book Keşke Bir Öpüp Koklasaydım (with Ozlem Delikanli in Turkish, Istanbul: Ayrıntı Yayınları September 2013).
The second phase of “Left Behind” covers the narratives of political refugees of the Coup in Europe and North America. She will be using the OHMA funds to complete her interviews in the United Kingdom.
Eylem Delikanli is an independent researcher and a writer for the daily BİRGün. She holds an MA in Sociology specializing in the sociology of communication. She is a founding member of Research Institute on Turkey (RIT)- a grassroots research cooperative based in NY focusing on commonization practices for social change in Turkey with an emphasis on social and economic justice, gender equality, sexual rights, cultural and political recognition, and ecologic sustainability from a critical historical perspective. Her recent archival work as part of the RIT Collective Memory includes the press archive of Devrimci Yol, one of Turkey’s largest political movements in the 70s. Eylem is also a member of Çocuklarız Bir Aradayız initiative – a group working towards building a collective memory of 1980 Coup D’État in Turkey. She is a Tunisian Transition Oral History Project fellow at INCITE / Columbia University. As an oral historian, Eylem’s work focuses on theories of post memory, collective memory, authoritarianism and silence.
Check out our other research award recipients and their work here.