Nazım Hikmet - Akrep Gibisin Kardeşim

American Presidential Election

A Public Lecture: A New Voice of Islam for World Peace and Hope: The Gulen Movement by Dr. Hasan Ali Yurtsever

African Movies at Virginia Tech

Panel: American Foreign Policy and Neo-Imperialism in Central Asia

Dear all,

This year, CESS (Central Eurasian Studies Society) conference will take place at Georgetown University and Gary Wood and I have organized a panel on American Foreign Policy and Neo-Imperialism in Central Asia. Dr. Kemal Silay will be a discussant in the panel. You are very welcome to come. Please share and distribute widely, apologies for cross-posting.

You will find the panel information below.


Central Eurasian Studies Society
Ninth Annual Conference, September 18-21, 2008
Georgetown University, Washington, DC
http://www.cess.muohio.edu/

American Foreign Policy and Neo-Imperialism in Central Asia
Friday, September 19, 2:00-3:45

Organizer: Gary Wood (Virginia Tech. University)

Chair: Tugrul Keskin (Virginia Tech. University)

Discussant: Kemal Silay (Indiana University)

1) Ajay Kumar Patnaik (Jawaharlal Nehru University), “Export of Democracy: US Geopolitical Moves in Central Asia”

2) Azeem Ibrahim (University of Cambridge), “Motivational Drivers of US Policy in Post Soviet Era”

3) Tugrul Keskin (Sociology-Virginia Tech University) and Gary Wood (Sociology-Virginia Tech University) “New-Imperialism and Promotion of Democracy in Central Asia: Case of NED and NDI”

4) Reed Taylor (ASPECT-Virginia Tech. University), “Hizb Ut-Tahrir in Uzbekistan: a Post-Colonial Critique”


Peace to you all,

Tugrul

Palestinian poet Darwish dies

http://www.mahmouddarwish.com/english/index.htm

I Come From There

Mahmoud Darwish

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.

I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother,
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood,
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up,
To make a single word: Homeland....

Mao to Neoliberaism: Beijing 2008

Rudyard Kipling's The White Man's Burden in China

China is an amazing place to see the transformation that has been embedded in global economic structures. Today, the Beijing 2008 Olympics began; however, the Olympics remind me of Moscow in 1980, when unfortunately, politics could not be separated from sports.

Peace,

Tugrul Keskin

Sociology of Islam and Muslim Societies Newsletter

SOCIOLOGY OF ISLAM & Muslim societies
SPRING 2008 Newsletter No. 1

The Sociology of Africa: Fall 2008

AFST-4354 Index No. 97048 (AFST)
Issues in Africana Studies
Sociology of Africa
Fall 2008

INSTRUCTOR: TUGRUL KESKIN

Tuesday and Thursday - 3:30 PM - 4:45PM - Surge 107

The Sociology of Africa course will explore the relationship and ongoing dynamics between colonizers and the colonized in 20th century Africa in the context of post-colonial studies. Nationalist, socialist, anti-colonialist, and Apartheid movements in Africa are each a direct consequence of imperialism and its legacy. In this course, we will try to understand the social, political and economic implications and dimensions of imperialism in the 20th century. Ethnic tensions in Kenya, Apartheid racism in South Africa, the Darfur conflict in Sudan, Christian and Muslim religious misunderstanding in Nigeria, and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda are each related with exploitation and a product of colonialization. In this course, we will also attempt to understand the positions of African leaders from an inside as opposed to an Orientalist perspective, such as the anti-colonialist Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), conservative African Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Idi Amin Dada (Uganda), the pro-African Nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria), and South African leader, Nelson Mandela.

One of the main objectives of this course is to build a website which will consist of as many as possible of the Nationalist, Anti-Colonialist and Socialist Movements and leaders in 20th century Africa. All of your final papers will be used in this website as a direct contribution to African civilization.


For more information: tugrulk@vt.edu or http://www.africanastudies.vt.edu/

Lecture: Islamist Imaginations of Turkey Ottoman's Past by Prof. Kemal Silay

Virginia Tech Presents

A Free Public Lecture

by

Professor Kemal Silay
Professor of Central Eurasian Studies,
Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies Chair Professor,
Director of the Turkish Studies Program at
Indiana University, Bloomington
http://php.indiana.edu/~ksilay/

ISLAMIST IMAGINATIONS OF TURKEY’S OTTOMAN PAST:
COUNTER-REVOLUTION THROUGH
CULTURE AND POLITICS

Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 5:00–7:00 pm
655 McBryde Hall

Sponsored by the Sociological Association at VT (SAV) with the support of the Department of Sociology; the Turkish Student Association at Virginia Tech; the Religious Studies Program; the Department of Science and Technology in Society; the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT); IDST; the International Studies Program; the Middle East Working Group, the Department of Political Science, the Institute of Turkish Studies at Georgetown University, and the Africana Studies Program

For more information:
Tugrul Keskin, tugrulk@vt.edu
Gary Wood, garywood@vt.edu

Kemal Silay is a leading scholar of Turkish Studies. Among his numerous publications are Nedim and the Poetics of the Ottoman Court: Medieval Inheritance and the Need for Change (Indiana, 1994); An Anthology of Turkish Literature (Indiana, 1996); Ahmedi’s History of the Kings of the Ottoman Lineage and Their Holy Raids against the Infidels (Harvard, 2004); On the Book of Handsome Ones: Same-Sex Discourse in Ottoman Court Literature (forthcoming); and Anatomy of a Folk Manuscript: The Hagiography of Abu al-Wafa (forthcoming).

the “Facebookification” of our lives

American Sociological Association

Contexts Magazine

Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2008

Social networking Internet sites might
be doing more to drive us apart than
bring us together. At least that’s what
the Washington Post suggested as sum-
mer wound down and it took a look at
the “Facebookification” of our lives.
From the 1954 work of J.A. Barnes
to Columbia’s Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees:
The Science of a Connected Age, the
report spanned the sociological trajectory
behind the actual and electronic
networks that, throughout history, have
done everything from help us find jobs
and homes to read about the minutia of
our lives that we post to the Internet.
Perhaps, interviews with sociologists
suggested, these sites miss the
mark because we’re busy adding
“friends” to our network and not busy
networking with friends.
In the end, the Post asked how we
“prevent social networking sites from
becoming the death of social networking”
perhaps the fundamental question
of this new cultural form.