Institute for Media and Creative Industries project receives European Endowment for Democracy support

The Institute for Media and Creative Industries has received support from the European Endowment for Democracy for a project which aims to capture and communicate women’s daily experiences, concerns, and struggles in contemporary Turkey.

The project entitled "Women's Memory and Media in Turkey" aims to create a comprehensive, objective and durable platform for the production and communication of women’s individual and collective memory of the present.

Led by Dr. Burce Celik from the Institute for Media and Creative Industries, the project will be completed in partnership with Kampussuzler, a Turkey-based NGO.

The European Endowment for Democracy, an independent International Trust Fund developed to foster democracy, provided support to the Women’s Memory and Media in Turkey project as it will combine oral history, social memory research and journalistic methods, to create an accessible, informative, and innovative web-based platform that will contribute to women’s consciousness, feminist and women’s rights activism and research.

This web-based platform will contain English and Turkish open-access digital archives of:

  • interviews with women
  • diaries of volunteers
  • journalistic content (such as newsletters and podcasts on themes concerning women’s lives, experiences and struggles).

The “Women’s Memory and Media in Turkey” project will include women living in Turkey and abroad, feminist researchers and activists, policy makers in/outside of Turkey, women’s collectives and organisations, and democratic and interested public.

About the project, Dr. Burce Celik said:

“While there are important women’s organisations, alternative media outlets and a social memory centre, there is no platform that researches, archives and publishes stories and experiences of women of Turkey under the current authoritarian regime. It is for this reason that our project will be crucial in the development of women’s collective memory, women’s resistance, feminist strategies of resilience and women’s rights advocacy in Turkey.”

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