The 2025 Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture on Freedom of Expression and Human Rights

Boğaziçi University Departments of History, Political Science and International Relations, and Sociology cordially invite you to the 2025 Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture. The talk, entitled "Whither 'the Conscience of Mankind': On Gaza and Genocide Refusal" will be delivered by Nadia Abu El-Haj on Thursday, April 24, 2025 at 18:30 (Istanbul time).

The event will be held via Zoom; and be presented in English and translated simultaneously into Turkish.

You may find the abstract for the lecture, and a short bio of Nadia Abu El-Haj below.

The lecture can be followed via the following link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83797817678?pwd=emJMObm3CTXDKLxWiIh2Cp9WTw1yGE.1

Zoom Meeting ID.: 837 9781 7678

Password: 195164

Whither "the Conscience of Mankind": On Gaza and Genocide Refusal

Talk Abstract:

Nearly 18 months into the brutal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, “we", in the West that is, arguing not so much about whether or not Israel is committing the crime of genocide. Tracing a series of historical shifts in the Post-War Euro-American order, this talk explores the grounds of what I consider not so-much genocide denial—"this is not a genocide"—but, rather, genocide refusal, that is, a refusal in much of the public domain, to even engage the debate.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. Among other publications, she is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002; The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America (Verso, 2022).