Presentations

• Joost Jongerden - "Challenging Coloniality: Kurdistan in the 21st Century"
• Eleonora Gea Piccardi - "Ecological Revolution through Gender Liberation: Theories and Praxis of Women's Struggle in Rojava, Western Kurdistan"
• Necmettin Türk - "Rojava's Rhizomatic Democracy: Autonomous Relationality of Organizations in Agriculture"

Speakers

Joost Jongerden (PhD) is an Associate Professor in the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His work takes place at the intersection of rural sociology, political sciences and historical sociology. He has worked on forced migration, rural development, and political & violent conflict in the Kurdistan region. His main interest is in the dynamics of dispossession, displacement and conflict and the ways in which people not only respond to the conditions in which they are made vulnerable, but also act upon ideas for creating a better future. He refers to this as Do-it-Yourself Development.

Eleonora Gea Piccardi is a PhD student in the program "Democracy in the 21st Century" at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra (Portugal). She graduated in Political Philosophy at the University of Roma Tre (Italy) with a thesis entitled "Production and reproduction: a feminist critique to the theory of value". She works on the Kurdish revolution now ongoing in Rojava (the Democratic Confederation of Northern Syria) using materialist (eco)feminism and social ecology as the main theoretical framework. With a decolonial perspective the research tries to analyze how non-Western experiences of social organization and political praxis can challenge the dominant Eurocentric vision on women liberation, ecology and democracy. 

Necmettin Türk is a PhD Candidate in the Working Group “Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities” at the Institute of Geography, Hamburg University (Germany). His PhD research project addresses the following issues: climate crisis and drought; community-based climate change adaptation; socio-ecological vulnerabilities; and the role of democratic autonomy/local governance and institutions/organizations in developing climate change-resilient agricultural system and communities alternatively.

The roundtable will be chaired by Pinar Dinc (PhD) is a researcher at CMES and Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Lund University. She has a Ph. D. in Political Science from the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. Her research interests lie in the areas of nationalism, ethnicity, social movements, memory, diaspora and the conflict-environment nexus in the Middle East and beyond. She leads the interdisciplinary Exploring Conflict- Environment Interactions for Sustainable Development and Conservation Project, ECO-Syria, since September 2023, which is funded by the Strategic Research Area: The Middle East in the Contemporary World (MECW) at the CMES Lund University.

The roundtable is held at CMES, Finngatan 16 in Lund. If you are not able to attend in-person, there is an option to attend via Zoom. Please register here for Zoom attendance: https://lu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Ylc-qrrzkvGdX-dcGdUY-3cfWSc8HcoAXy

This event is co-organized with the MECW project Exploring Conflict- Environment Interactions for Sustainable Development and Conservation Project, ECO-Syria. It is part of the CMES seminar series spring 2024. For more information, visit the CMES website.