Saygun Gökarıksel
Student Fellow
Saygun Gökarıksel is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on the political and legal aspects of “democratic transitions” from authoritarian rule and specifically, the post-1989 ethico-political and judicial reconstructions of East European socialist experience on the basis of Communist Secret Service archives. Central to his research are themes of popular sovereignty, state formation, and political violence, concepts of truth, justice, and the public, and ethics of knowing, reconciliation, antagonism, and political life. He has taught in the Anthropology Departments of Lehman College and Queens College. His writing has appeared in Polish, Romanian, and Turkish journals.
Participating Years
2012–2013
Uprisings: in History, in Process, in the Future
The last year has witnessed an extraordinary flowering of political and social protest across the globe. Each location of struggle, whether the revolutions sometimes called the “Arab Spring” or the vigorous demonstrations of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, provides important lessons in how we understand social change in the current conjuncture.What is the longue durée of such struggle? How do uprisings reconfigure the social? How are they represented and is representation itself an uprising?