Studies on undercover police surveillance, highlighting the fear provoked by the undercover police agents, demonstrated how police surveillance serves as a mechanism of control and discipline, forcing individuals to be active agents of their own subjection. By taking a different path than such studies and drawing on the experiences of the residents of a racialized working-class space under constant undercover police surveillance in Turkey, I argue that the undercover police surveillance, despite their privileged space in law enforcement in authoritarian contexts, does not always compel individuals into self-policing, complicity and inaction. In order to understand how, despite grave consequences, certain populations or individuals continue to manifest their dissent against repressive and punitive security states, I suggest we take the redemptive power of the death over the living into account. Drawing on Avery Gordon’s analysis of the ghost and haunting, inspired by psychoanalysis and Benjaminian historical materialism, I approach ghosts and spirits of those martyrs who lost their lives fighting against oppression and/or due to state violence as social as political agents, who incite self-reflection on issues related to ethical self-formation (ala Foucault), among those who are familiar with their lives and deaths, and encourages them to defy their fear to engage in defiant action.
Deniz Yonucu is a research fellow at the Critical Thinking Residency Program at the Freie Universität Berlin. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from Cornell University. She holds two MA degrees in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and in Sociology from Bogazici University. Before joining the Freie Universität Berlin, she was a DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München at the Institut für Ethnologie, and Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung at Forum Transregionale Studien and Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. Deniz Yonucu’s work has appeared in International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Social & Legal Studies, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, among others. She has also published various op-ed articles related to her area of research in openDemocracy, Jadaliyya, PoLAR Forum and beyond. Her work focuses on urban violence, sectarianism, leftist activism, counterinsurgent policing, the criminalization of racialized working-class youth, and human rights. Her book manuscript, War on Politics: Policing, Counterinsurgency, and Political Space in Istanbul, is currently under review at Cornell University Press.
In accordance with the measures against the spread of the coronavirus, this seminar session will be held virtually. Depending on approval by the speakers, the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available via the account of the Forum Transregionale Studien on Soundcloud.
