Interrogating citizenship & identity through art

The identity and citizenship of women of color and migrant women are scrutinized within several public and political debates. Recent examples include the ruling of the European Court allowing employers to ban staff from wearing visible religious symbols and the backlash Sylvana Simons received after announcing she would pursue a career as a politician. However these discussions are often about women of color instead of conversing with them.

This talkshow will be talking about the ways gender and ethnicity inform our practices of citizenship and how academic research can engage with women of color as active co-producers of knowledge and citizenship instead of seeing them as the recipients of social citizenship. Currently the knowledge produced by women of color and migrant women are used to inform policy makers, but are not engaged actively in order to redefine how we understand and enact citizenship.

The keynote speaker dr. Umut Erel will reflect on the importance of Participatory Arts and Social Action Research to understand and enact citizenship. Her research employs an intersectional approach and explores how gender, migration and ethnicity inform practices of citizenship. Her current research focuses on care and citizenship among migrant mothers and their co-resident children. This explores how migrant women’s mothering practices can be conceptualized as citizenship practices.

The panel consists of Dutch women of color who reflect on the meaning of citizenship and the production of knowledge with their own creative projects:

Mariam el Maslouhi is the co-founder of the ‘Dipsaus Podcast’, which is a podcast for and by women of color.

Ipek Sur is the co-producer of theatrical concert ‘A Woman is A Woman’ where she and colleague Meral Polat interrogate what a woman is and what a woman is expected to be.

Saniye Tezcan works at Stichting Kezban and uses creative methods to raise awareness about domestic violence.

About the organizers:

This talkshow is organised by Figan Tuncer (PhD student, department of Media and Culture) and Berna Toprak (RMA Gender & Ethnicity) and powered by CCHR (Cultures, Citizenship and Human Rights) project of Utrecht University. Figan and Berna are interested in creative ways of engaging with women of color as co-producers of knowledge and citizenship.

For more information and to register, please go here.