My PhD project explores the aesthetic and affective codes of a particular notion of indebtedness, a 'feeling of indebtedness,' as an outcome of German educational efforts institutionalized in Istanbul over the course of the 20th century. I interrogate this feeling through the lens of affect theory as a pedagogical 'genre,' by bringing my research closer to Black studies and critical migration studies. My high school, the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi Istanbul High School for Boys, also known as Istanbul High School, which is housed in the former headquarters of a 20th-century European credit institution named the Düyûn-ı Umûmiye Ottoman Public Debt Administration, OPDA becomes the imaginative site for 'desire-based research,' as Eve Tuck suggests. If this German school abroad were a credit institution, a time machine, how could it inform me about the historical processes through which a 'feeling of indebtedness' educates collective desires conforming to German labor, emancipation, and citizenship models? Keeping Lauren Berlant’s concept of 'cruel optimism' dear to my research, I question whether the German pedagogical promises in Asia Minor pose an obstacle to the flourishing of migrant subjects desirous of German education. Thus, I critique the violent histories along the modern German-Turkish industrial complexes of labor, culture, and military. I lean on intergovernmental agreements and familial biographies of labor, migration, and conversion. In pursuit of affective remedies for such histories' violence, I depart from 'redemptive migrant images' of my solo exhibition 'Teneffüs' Recess, which opened at Salt Galata (Istanbul, 2022) in the former headquarters of the Bank-ı Osmanî-i Şahane Imperial Ottoman Bank. Employing my methodology of 'flickering migrations,' I hope that it inspires a thriving culture of memory and accountability. keywords: queer, migration, education, Debt, affect, optics, Naturalization, transdiciplinarity
Aykan Safoglu (Thu,) studied this question.
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