Sahika Erkonan

  • Doctoral researcher within the Institute for Creative Futures

Sahika is a doctoral researcher in the Institute for Creative Futures. She received her BA in Linguistics from Hacettepe University and later she got her MA in Radio, Television and Film Studies from Ankara University.

Profile

During her PhD research, Sahika worked on the “Women’s Memory and Media in Turkey” project with the principal investigator Dr. Burce Celik in Loughborough University London. She worked as a research associate and in archiving oral history materials on digital platforms within this project. Currently she is working in Armenian Institute London as an archivist and deputy librarian.

PhD research

Present Encounters with the Past: An Ethnographic Inquiry into the London Armenian Community.

Sahika's thesis explores memories of the Armenian genocide in the London Armenian diaspora. It does so through an ethnography of the London Armenian community that combines sensuous scholarship with Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory. Its purpose is to provide new insight into community members’ personal affective engagement with cultural memory, and into how postmemory resists the destruction wrought by trauma. These insights necessitate three chief methodological considerations, namely: how the body acts as an archive; how objects, photography and spatial imagination evoke memory; and how the researcher’s identity as a ‘Turkish’ person can be incorporated into a critical subjectivity.

PhD supervisors

Professor Jo Tacchi and Dr Jessica Noske-Turner.

Papers, publications and articles

  • Erkonan, Ş. (2014) “Aile Fotoğrafları: Aile Belleğinin Kurgulanmasında Fotoğrafın Rolünü Etnografik Yöntemle İncelemek” Moment Dergi, Hacettepe Üniversitesi İletişim Fakültesi Kültürel Çalışmalar Dergisi 2014, 1 (2) : 122- 147
  • Erkonan, S. (2020). The politics of self-reflexivity in ethnography. Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 11(1), 115-118.
  • Erkonan, S (2016) “Photography and the Construction of Family and Memory”, ECREA Summer School Book

Workshops and Presentations

  • Workshop ‘Academic Freedom and Production of Knowledge in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia Today’ (28 October 2017), University of Exeter, Speaker in the panel “The Production of Knowledge: The University and Beyond”
  • ECREA Summer School 2015: “History, Photography and Nationalism: Telling Armenian Genocide through Family Images”, Bremen, Germany