Events

Abstract

“My sister was sold to the Arabs before I was born” are words uttered by my Cypriot grandmother during my bedtime story in London 1986, which have underpinned my research trajectory. Focusing on this Cyprus-Palestine case study as example, this paper introduces my ongoing project on Partitioned Mediterraneans. I will speak through my decades long re/search to understand this moment, which led me to encounter overlapping and intertwined displaced and diverse voices who sought refuge in Cyprus. Though these voices and the Mediterranean island of Cyprus—in Europe and the Arab world but not quite—are a crucial anchor for understanding a region shaped by continuous colonialism, catastrophe, exodus, and partition, they remain marginal in public and scholarly discourse. This ongoing encounter with excluded voices demanded a new interdisciplinary model, which radically opens the archive by bridging humanities with social sciences. Grounded in co-creation and community engagement, this approach carries the weight of ‘lived experiences’ while tracing multiple colonialisms, partitions, and displacements that expose processes of epistemic silence and exclusion. Thus, the paper will show ways the project co-produces new knowledge with excluded communities, which expose, think with and reconfigure multiple-mutable cruelly partitioned Mediterraneans and, by extension, our cruelly partitioned world.

Bio

Bahriye Kemal is a postcolonial scholar and an activist–advocate for displaced and marginalized communities. She is a London-born Cypriot to refugees from Cyprus, a background that has shaped the foundations of her interdisciplinary research and activism. She recently joined the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork; prior to this, she was a Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kent. Anchored in postcolonial literary studies and histories, her work spans sociology, ethnography, geography, and the politics of everyday. She has published widely on postcolonial, partition, spatial and displacement studies. She is co‑founder of research institutes, community networks, and NGOs across the UK, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, Palestine and Syria, where she co‑produces scholarly and public outputs with refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, and prisoners. These research projects have been generously supported by multiple philanthropic funders (e.g., the Stelios Foundation), public/government research bodies (e.g. AHRC, British Academy, ESRC, CARA, Enterprise Ireland), and university‑based institutional funders – most recently Collective Social Futures.