Street and Field: Hygiene, Disease, and Death Across Spaces and Ages

“On June 19, we will explore how a wide range of actors, including governing bodies, medical authorities, municipal institutions, ordinary people, and non-human agents, participated in shaping and reshaping spaces of hygiene, disease, and death across and beyond the rural–urban divide.

Symposium Program

08.45 – 09.30 I Registration & Coffee
09.30 – 09.45 I Welcome and Opening Remarks

09.45- 11.00 I Session 1: Governing Bodies and Death
Chair: Ceren Gülser İlikan Rasimoğlu

Selvihan Kurt — Spaces of Contagion and Control: Cemeteries, Public Health, and Urban Transformation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century İzmir

Meryem Sevencan — The Plague of Putrefied Bodies of the Poor: Defoe’s Journal and the Socio-Economic Reality of the Great Plague of London

Esra Abaoğlu — On Places Chosen for Self-Inflicted Death: Patterns in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire

11.00 – 11.20 I Coffee Break

11.20 – 12.50 I Session 2: Water, Waste, Odor: Infrastructures of Hygiene
Chair: Zehra Betül Atasoy
İsmail Yaşayanlar — Hydroscapes of Contagion: Cholera, Environment, and State Power in the Late Ottoman Empire
Agah E. Yasa — Urban Deodorization and the Displacement of Tanneries: Odor, Labor, and Space in Bursa
Eda Nur Dalgıç — Urban Cleaning and Waste Management Systems of Istanbul in the Early Republican Era
Can Gümüş-İspir — Public Toilets as Liminal Infrastructures in Late Ottoman Istanbul

12.50 – 14.00 I Lunch Break

14.00-15.30 I Session 3: Scalar Geographies of Health and Hygiene
Chair: Nükhet Varlık
Sumisha Parangottu — Spaces of Governance: Medical Surveillance in Colonial Malabar’s Epidemic Landscapes
LIU Pei — Negotiating the Rational Boundary: Madness, Street, and the Making of Hygienic Space in Republican Beijing (1910s–1920s)
Gürbey Hiz — A Healthy Smoke: Hygiene Discourse on Late Ottoman Cigarette Paper Wrappers
Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva — Between Borders and Belongings: Plague, History, and Memory in the Brazilian Hinterland (1920-Present)

15.30 – 15.50 I Coffee Break

15.50 – 17.20 I Session 4: Spatial Imaginaries of Health
Chair: Emre Sünter
Mine Bertan Yılmaz — Social Virtual Reality Platforms as Digital Healthscapes: Care, Illness and Death in the Production of Virtual Space
Bilgen Dündar & Aslı Uzunkaya — Hygiene as the Zero Point of Urban Arrhythmia
Aybike Batuk — A Microscopic Attunement: Particulate Matter and Dissolution of Spatial Binaries
Ali Nâzım Beşikçi — A Call for Digital Street

17.20- 18:00 I Rezan Has Museum Tour

18:00 -18.30 I Closing Remarks: Nükhet Varlık, Koray Durak, Ayşecan Terzioğlu