Özge Serin

Özge Serin is a political anthropologist and an emerging documentary filmmaker. Her scholarship centers around histories of radical politics, formations of violence, and carceral cultures with a particular focus on the temporal structure of hunger striking, its modes of strategic functioning, its communicative force and ethical vicissitudes. In a close engagement with Marxist critical theory, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis, much of her work is animated by this central question: Who or what emerges in the boundary between the virtual space of dying and the symbolic space of politics? In Writing of Death: Ethics and Politics of the Death Fast in Turkey, her current book manuscript, she argues that the analytic of temporality provides a privileged vantage point into the arrival of speech across the divide between these incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked space-times of death and the political.

Serin is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Award, The Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics Andrew Mellon Fellowship, and Columbia University Middle East Institute Dissertation Fellowship. During the academic year 2015-2016, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University, New Brunswick where she actively participated in the ongoing research project Ethical Subjects: Moralities, Laws, Histories.

She is the co-editor (with Nergis Ertürk) of a special issue of boundary 2 entitled Marxism, Communism, and Translation. Her publications include “The Use-Value of Idioms: The Language of Marxism and Language As Such” in boundary 2, “Egemen Çöküş: Ölüm Orucu ve Siyasal” [The Sovereign Lapse: Death Fast and the Political] in Kampfplatz, and “Insistence: The Temporality of the Death Fast and the Political,” in Re-enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory forthcoming from the Cultural Inquiry Series of Turia + Kant Press.

Serin has also completed (with Brian Karl) an experimental documentary Death/Fast which has premiered at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco on March 29, 2017. References to and reproduction of stills from Death/Fast are included in the introduction to the volume Experimental Film and Anthropology (Bloomsbury, 2014).