Fellowship

Pelin Tan’s teaching and territorial research combines academic and noninstitutional structures to foster a methodology based on collective processes of knowledge production. She looks at forms of resistance, artistic methodologies, and theoretical perspectives to generate alliances and assemblies across disciplinary and territorial borders. Decolonization and necropolitics are key concepts with which to activate and discuss responses to the question of how “we” can configure enactments of non-fascist living. For Tan, to decolonize is to go beyond the binary of colonizer/colonized and the resulting subject formations, and consider how the mechanisms of necropolitics (perpetuated in, for example, urban warfare in Turkey in the post-Gezi struggle since 2013) must be included in the decolonial process. Furthermore, Tan employs anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s term “geontology” to shift the definition of biopolitics to encompass non-life, including infrastructures and landscapes shaped by war and migration.