On December 9, at 5:00 PM (Tbilisi time), the Anthropology Research Center and the Doctoral Program in Anthropology at Ilia State University will host an online lecture by Dr. Havva Nese Özgen, an associated researcher at IMIS, Osnabrück University, titled – “Stateless Inside and Outside Refugee Camps”
This presentation invites a reconsideration of statelessness—not as a legal deficiency or absence of citizenship, but as a distinct condition of life. Drawing on my current research project, The Camp as a Life-world: Memories of Statelessness in the Kurdish Refugee Experience, I explore how statelessness takes shape and is lived within and beyond refugee camps in Europe.
Over the years, my work has examined camps as paradoxical spaces—sites of confinement and surveillance, yet also of creativity, solidarity, and the emergence of political subjectivity under conditions of closure. This new research turns toward the emotional, temporal, and material dimensions of living without a state—or even against the state. It investigates how Kurdish refugees in Greece and Germany reconstruct belonging through memory, kinship, and storytelling under the camp conditions.
The presentation reflects on how statelessness and the rejection of statehood can be understood anthropologically—as life-worlds shaped by waiting, displacement, and bureaucratic invisibility, yet sustained by care, endurance, and political imagination. It further examines how the EU’s legal and procedural frameworks, while claiming protection, in fact reproduce uncertainty and institutionalize statelessness. Ultimately, it asks what forms of knowledge, ethics, and politics become possible when life itself must be lived without the state.
Dr. Havva Nese Özgen is a professor of sociology and anthropology from Turkey, currently she is an exiled scholar and an associated researcher at IMIS, Osnabrück University(Germany). Her research interests include qualitative and quantitative research techniques and methodologies (Engaged Anthropology issues), capital accumulation and citizenship at the borders, especially on the state, border and class, political geography of motherland, gender and gendered of borders. She carried her research to South-Eastern (Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan), Eastern (Iran), and Northeastern Anatolian borders (Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan), as well as the Western (Bulgarian, Greece) land borders of Turkey.
Working Language: English
Date and Time: December 9, 5:00 PM (Tbilisi time)
Format: Online via Zoom