Değiş Tokuş Talks continued with the second talk delivered by Aslı Iğsız, titled ‘Population Exchange: From Demographic Engineering to Cultural Concepts and Policies’, on Friday evening of June 25, 2021. (The talk is in Turkish) 

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The cornerstone of Iğsız’s talk was the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange and how population exchange was justified in the international arena as a means of peaceful conflict resolution in the succeeding years. She then focused on the efforts to segregate people and prevent them from mixing with each other through demographic engineering, which ignored their ideologies, and to categorize people based on bodily coding. Iğsız then shifted her orientation to how the UN contributed to justification of this method, especially after the Second World War. Iğsız demonstrated how concepts were also being exchanged/interchanged, which allowed for the systematization of settlement policies, and the definition of borders through social borders/social mobility. Among the examples she has provided were adoption of eugenics and systemization of racialized logics to solve social problems, deportation, or marginalization of unwelcome groups through creation of social borders, and creation of the ‘social baggage’ concept that was used to define people who do not contribute to the economy by working desirable jobs, and UNESCO’s preference over defining race through culture than biology. 

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About Aslı Iğsız:
After graduating from Boğaziçi University English Language Teaching Department (1993), she completed her first master's degree in French Literature (1996) at Hacettepe University. She received her second master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies (2000) from Michigan University. Iğsız, who received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her research interests include political violence, eugenics, humanism, spatial segregation and forced migration, and cultural policy. Her first book Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford University Press) was published in 2018. Currently, she is working on a new project on the notion of fascist utopias in the contemporary world context. Iğsız will spend 2021-2022 at the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to complete this monograph.