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Takhayyul Nativeness and Emergent Issues Podcast
The Institute for Global Prosperity's ERC Project Takhayyul is carried out in eleven different countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia, often included in the concept of the Global South, where people are more vulnerable to global changes and crises - as we have seen in the flood catastrophe in Pakistan. Many members of the team are scholars who have expertise in the geographies they grew up in.
This series has emerged due to the pressing issues that have been taking place in the contexts that the team works on and cares about. The team felt an urgent need to create a platform where they can address the emergent issues as they happen, to channel their intellectual and academic expertise, and express their deep care for the events taking place.
About the project
TAKHAYYUL is a collaborative research project that will ethnographically excavate the imaginative forces in the formation of populist religious aspirations in the interconnected geographies recently coined as the Balkan-to-Bengal complex - namely the Balkans, the Middle East, and South Asia.
Such political aspirations provide its followers with a wide range of historical references, religious cosmologies, nationalist feelings and other affective and imaginative registers; this is best represented by the concept of takhayyul (a theory of imagination).
The Institute for Global Prosperity’s ERC-funded TAKHAYYUL project will develop an extensive and comparative formulation of the concept to set the basis for an anthropology of imagination and expand anthropological knowledge on religious politics by exploring the historical, ethical and aesthetic aspects. This project seeks to contribute to global prosperity by offering a fresh perspective that does not reproduce the tropes on irrationality. Instead, it is designed to provide a sound theoretical ground upon which to delineate the ways populist forms of religious politics forge imaginative landscapes beyond the borders of nation-states.
Project website: www.takhayyulproject.com
Project lead: Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu
Art piece: Laurelie Rae, “the pandemic” made from 2020 to 2022, water colour and shell gold on paper 56cm x 76cm
