Wednesday, March 14, 2018
4 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
McKinney Conference Room
Human rights are politically fraught in Turkey. Nevertheless, Turkey's human rights record remains a key indicator of its governmental legitimacy. Bureaucratic Intimacies shows how government workers encounter human rights rhetoric through training programs and articulates the perils and promises of these encounters for the subjects and objects of Turkish governance. Elif Babül argues that the accession process does not always advance human rights. Training programs strip human rights of their radical valences, disassociating them from their political meanings within grassroots movements. Translation of human rights into a tool of good governance leads to competing understandings of what human rights should do.