[Dissertation] The discoursive ‚running to and fro‘ between Sarajevo and Istanbul: a Bosniak-Turkish communicative figuration in the context of gentrificating the Ottoman hinterland

  Research Question My central research question is how the experience and collective memory of (mostly forced) Muslim refugeeness — known as muhacirlik in Turkish — is interrelated with the rehabilitation and gentrification of the Ottoman past in significant parts of the political and societal sphere of Turkey and the „Western Balkans“ in the past...

[Migration] The Rediscovery of the Balkans? A Bosniak-Turkish Figuration in the Third Space Between Istanbul and Sarajevo

Thomas Schad: The Rediscovery of the Balkans? A Bosniak-Turkish Figuration in the Third Space Between Istanbul and Sarajevo This Working Paper delienates the construction of diasporic spaces by Bosniak communities residing in İstanbul and İzmir. Based on an ongoing multilocal anthropological field research conducted by Thomas Schad, a PhD Candidate in Berlin Graduate School Muslim...

[Articles] From Muslims into Turks? Consensual demographic engineering between Interwar Yugoslavia and Turkey

Thomas Schad: "From Muslims into Turks": Consensual demographic engineering between Interwar Yugoslavia and Turkey This article focuses on the Yugoslav–Turkish agreement on the resettlement of Muslims from the Serb-dominated lands of southern Yugoslavia to Turkey from 1938. The agreement was part of a broader series of state-directed population resettlement projects in the interwar period that...

[Kapital] Money as a belief system in metamorphosis

After last night's long conversation with my friend on different phenomenological dimensions of the metamorphosis of the world (vulgo: digitalisation and its revolutionary afterbirth), I dreamt myself during a night shift at Sabancı University's 24/7 library. It was in April 2014. In that dream, I saw me walking to the vending machine at the building's...

[Politik] Civilian death and martyrdom in academia

I listened to that name yesterday, in a podcast of Açık Radyo (Open Radio), with some delay. And I realized -- and I actually realize similar absurdities all the time -- that scholars quoted in my masters thesis, in my dissertation (underway & in spe), so far living in footnotes and elsewhere in my writings,...

[Bosnia] The čardak defter — Olovo

In this moment, when I decided to write the čardak defter, I am in Olovo. I am sitting on a bank next to the river Stupčanica, whose riverbed is subdued by man-made rocky walls. I see the hotel Akvaterm next to me. The bank is built around a small česma (fountain), pouring warm thermal water...

[Bosnia] In Bosnia II: On traditions and naming

As long as there is tradition, names can tell you a lot there, in Bosnia. But with traditions, it is complicated, not only there, and we will face many contradi(c)tions. Amongst people who come from the muslim tradition in Bosnia, it is an outspoken spiritual advise that names must be beautiful (lijepa imena). But there...

[Bosnia] In Bosnia (I)

In Bosnia, everything else was quite different from the Izmir experience. Bosnia was the starting and ending point of my Balkans tour, between Sarajevo’s Baščaršija, Mostar’s Old Bridge, Sandžak’s pešter heights and Ibar valley, Prizren’s multilingual place name signs, Macedonia’s shrub lands and Alexander the Great statues. Different were the little things: you drink čaj...

[Turkey] What is your memleket? Semi-bohemian coffeehouse reflections in Izmir

Yabancı in İzmir In Izmir, I was a hampered and hobbling yabancı (foreigner) with limited contacts, with less "world" than in İstanbul. I moved myself from one to another café every day, where I would contemplate in front of my field diary, throwing myself into the indefinite ocean of writing, contained by my migrant notebook,...