Translating Game of Thrones into Turkish: the man who brought Jon Snow to Turkey
If you walk down the side streets of Istanbul you will see posters advertising any number of bad bars or worse politicians, all produced with the help of brazen copyright infringement. Knowing this, I wasn’t surprised to see a wolf head silhouette. It was the emblem of House Stark, the honorable family from the massively popular American show Game of Thrones.
I was a little surprised to see the name of a nightclub inscribed in the sigil; I used to work across the street from it, and I remembered long nights overlooking its empty bar and bored DJ. But the text stopped me cold in my tracks: “To commemorate 40 days since the death of Jon Snow, we ask his dear loved ones to join us.”
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Unsettled belonging: educating Palestinian American youth since 9/11
came to the US to attend Swarthmore College in the early 1980s. Having grown up in Iran and Lebanon, and traveled often to spend time with my family in Palestine, my political consciousness was shaped by ongoing fallout from legacies of colonialism. It was not an easy time to articulate a political commitment to justice in Palestine. Even among the many left-leaning political activists who were working hard to oppose South African apartheid, and US backed genocidal wars in Central America, I consistently heard a fierce refusal to engage with justice for Palestine. Palestinians remained framed simply through the lens of “terrorism.” I had to fight (thankfully with the support of some fabulous professors) to be allowed to do a senior thesis about Palestine. Moreover, although I was confronted by racist discourses about Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and so forth, there was no context within which to talk about global racial formations that render these groups racialized Others.
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Exit Davutoglu: Turkish PM squeezed out as fears for the future intensify
Turkey's Prime Minister of nearly two years Ahmet Davutoğlu has announced his intention to quit his post “for the unity of the party” amid evidence of a bubbling conflict with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Davutoglu was the second most important figure in the AKP (Justice and Development Party) that has dominated Turkish politics for over a decade and his likely disappearance from the political scene is viewed as robbing the country of a potential check on Erdogan's ambitions.
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