Seçil Dağtaş, holder of the "Germaine Tillion: Tomorrow, the Mediterranean" Chair, presents her research on the evolution of memory-making in the wake of destruction and displacement.
Based at Iméra (the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University) for the 2025-2026 academic year, in partnership with Région Sud, Seçil Dağtaş explores how devastated urban spaces in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean are transformed into active archival fields. Her work challenges traditional views by treating archives as dynamic, fragmented, and living entities.
• Archiving Catastrophe: Investigating how communities document history and identity when the material conditions of memory have been obliterated.
• The Power of Digital Traces: Analyzing how fragile and impermanent digital data forge new connections to "place" following urban ruin.
• Ethnographic Fieldwork: A critical approach combining cultural analysis and archival research to bridge fractured narratives of the past with hopes for the future.
• Sustaining Collective Memory: Examining the social and epistemic work required to maintain cultural heritage in zones of conflict and transition.
• Région Sud (in French): https://www.maregionsud.fr/
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Video transcript
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0:08 My name is Sechil Datesh. I am a political anthropologist working on minority lives and archives in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. I'm originally from Turkey, and I moved to Canada 20 years ago for graduate studies, and I earned my PhD in anthropology from the University of Toronto. Currently, I am based in the anthropology department at the University of Waterloo. I'm also a faculty member at the Balsalli School of International Affairs. My research draws on long-term fieldwork on religious coexistence in southern Turkey and
0:37 collaborative projects on asylum and migration in Cyprus and Turkey. I am particularly interested in how religious minorities and displaced communities build social ties under conditions of political upheaval and violence. Over the next five months, I'm developing a project on how catastrophic events transform the way affected communities remember and document their roles and state claims to their past and futures. I focus on Mediterranean contexts where cities and social life have been disrupted by environmental disasters, political violence, wars, conflict, or mass displacement.
1:16 These situations often generate what is termed as archival impulse, that is a strong drive to record what is lost or the loss itself. Some of the resources I have looked at include digital maps of destroyed cities, memorial websites, and exhibitions curating salvaged objects, photography, and testimonies. So I study how these initiatives take shape, who sustains them, and what they do politically and socially. I see these practices as more than just ways of preserving memories of the past, but as technologies of futurity carrying hopes, anticipations, and ethical and juridical claims
1:54 of those who refuse erasure. I'm especially interested in the role digital tools play in this process, how they let marginalized voices circulate beyond official narratives, and yet how they remain rooted in physical places, community labor. and unstable material conditions. This work grows out of my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Antakya, near Turkey's border with Syria, where I studied everyday politics of religious difference. In my first book, I examined how the region's religiously diverse Arabophone communities
2:30 sustained social life across bazaars, homes, neighborhoods and places of worship under conditions of authoritarianism and regional upheaval. When the 2023 earthquakes devastated those very communities and spaces, my earlier work took on an unexpected archival quality that I had to reckon with. I also witnessed how survivors documented their losses to archival, artistic and digital initiatives. I began to see a broader pattern across the Mediterranean that I wanted to explore further. What kind of archives do people create when destruction, displacement or loss structure
3:07 everyday life? What kind of methods or motivations drive such archiving initiatives? And how do scholars, often sharing a sense of urgency with their interlocutors, engage these kinds of archives? Marseille, as a cosmopolitan port city, long shaped by histories of migration and religious diversity, offers an inspiring setting for me to conduct this research on archival politics and future making across the Mediterranean. I'm especially interested in collaborations on archival politics, futurity and interreligious relations, including the shared sacred sites initiative, co-directed by
3:42 scholars at Aix Marseille University. ¿Qué ¿Qué ¿Qué These conversations would allow me to connect my research on Turkey, Cyprus, and Syria to perspectives from the Western Mediterranean and North Africa on mobility, memory, and minoritized religious heritage.
