Presentation: Ayfer Bartu Candan 

Moderator: Hülya Karcı

It has been more than sixty years since the first labor agreement between Turkey and Germany. The image of the migrant worker heading to Germany has long been built around the figure of a young man. With her presentation, Ayfer Bartu Candan, will discuss migration, labor, and gender through the invisible stories of women workers who went to Germany under the labor agreement. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic methods, the experiences of first-generation women workers will be explored not solely through the lens of ‘tradition’ and ‘cultural norms’, but through both structural factors such as employment, housing, and migration policies, and social factors such as cultural values and family dynamics.

Ayfer Bartu Candan served in the Department of Sociology at Boğaziçi University between 2003 and 2024, and has been working as Research Director at the Hrant Dink Foundation since 2024. She received her undergraduate degree in Sociology and Psychology from Boğaziçi University in 1990, and completed her MA and PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997. Her research interests include urban anthropology, political anthropology, political ecology, material culture studies, migration and gender, sociological and anthropological theory, and the relationships between space, power, and gender. Her publications include Yeni İstanbul Çalışmaları: Sınırlar, Mücadeleler, Açılımlar (2014), co-edited with Cenk Özbay and published by Metis, and Kültür Denen Şey: Antropolojik Yaklaşımlar (2018).

The event will be held in Turkish and registration is not required.