I am a postdoctoral researcher at the College of Mexico (Colmex). I usually work on the legitimation and delegitimation of state-sponsored violence, dehumanization, racism, authoritarianism, and the role of digital platforms in reproducing and legitimizing violent structures. My work is transdisciplinary and I usually focus on the cases of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict and the Colombian conflict. I will probably write about my research, but what I wanted to write about most in this blog is the problems of contemporary academia and the inequalities it produces.
I wanted to start blogging again since I stopped using Substack, except for this one post. I have tried to blog regularly in the past, but it never worked out. I hope that this time it will. I chose the same name as my Substack blog, and I will try to continue what I have started there. The name of the blog is a reference to Gloria Anzaldúa’s brilliant book. We used borderlands theory to explain our experiences as PhD students in Colombia in an article published in March 2021 in case you are interested.
As a Kurdish scholar, who did his PhD in Colombia and is currently working in Mexico, I will be talking about the issues of contemporary academia from an underrepresented perspective since some problems that I identify are different from those experienced by most scholars working in the so-called ‘Global North’. I will also try to write some blog posts in Spanish, especially about what is happening in West Asia (I try to avoid using the term ‘Middle East’ because of the obvious Eurocentrism, but it is not an easy job). This will not be a jolly blog since I work on political violence, but I will try to make it interesting. Meanwhile you can also check out my old posts or academic texts.
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