|
|
|
Email: ucsamia@ucl.ac.uk
Year of start: 2011
Subject: Social Anthropology
Research Topic/ Provisional Dissertation Title
Ada Kaleh Tales: Topographies of Displacement, Memory and Translocal Imaginaries
Supervisor(s)
First: Dr. Charles Stewart
Second: Dr. Ger Duijzings (SSEES
Department)
Introduction
My research considers Ada Kaleh, the submerged island of the Danube. The local community, mostly of Turkish ethnicity, was forcibly dislodged to remote areas of both Romania and Turkey, due to the building of a dam. This study explores more than 40 years of post-factual drama, in tight connection with the Communist policies of containment. I will explore the traumas of displacement through the voices of the people; this includes the differentiated trauma discourses among the members of the community, techniques of moral imagination, screen memories and the idealized reconstruction of the place.
Moreover, I will explore the memorial processes through which Ada Kaleh was transformed from a landscape to an “ideoscape”; this includes its transformation in popular culture into a metonym of the “lost paradise”. Lastly, the study will follow the devising schemes that seek the reconstruction of the island’s heritage on a nearby plot of land named Simian Island.
The research brings a historical correction for the voices of dissent that could not be conveyed before the fall of the totalitarian regime. Additionally, the study seeks to critique the positivist and schematic models of developmental studies regarding dam population displacement.
Academic Background/Education
MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology, University College London, 2011
MA in Anthropology and Community Development, University of Bucharest, 2010
BA in Sociology, University of Bucharest, 2008
Honours and Awards
Best Master Paper in Anthropology. Awarded by the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) and The Romanian Society for Cultural Anthropology (SACR), 2011.
