Introduction to Kurdish People & Culture

Service Description

Introduction to Kurdish People and Culture: Continuity of a Human Group • Level: Semi-academic / Introductory • Duration: 10 Weeks (1 Hour per week) Description: This course offers a comprehensive cultural and intellectual exploration of Kurdish society through critical, constructivist, and post-colonial analytical lenses. Moving deliberately beyond essentialist paradigms and ahistorical templates, the course interrogates spatial perceptions, tribal and urban socio-political structures, negotiated imperial frontiers, religious heterodoxy, gender dynamics, state modernization, expressive and performative arts, and contemporary transnational diasporic configurations. Weekly Syllabus Week 1: Trapped Between the Map and Reality: Geography, Cartography, and Spatial Perceptions Week 2: Deconstructing "Kurdish Studies": Beyond Orientalism, Coloniality, and Primordialism Week 3: Social Fabric: Tribes, Kinship, Non-Tribal Peasants, and Urban Realities Week 4: Pre-Modern Political Order: Emirates, Condominium Rule, and Ottoman-Safavid Dynamics Week 5: The Religious Landscape: Sunni Islam, Sufi Orders, and Medrese Culture Week 6: Kurdish Religious Minorities: Yezidism & The Yāresān (Ahl-e Haqq) Week 7: Gender Dynamics: Patriarchal Structures, Colonial Modernity, and Women's Activism Week 8: The Fragmented 20th Century: State Borders, Modernization, and Assimilation Week 9: Performing Kurdishness: Soundscapes, Folklore, Theatre, and Cinema Week 10: Transnational Imagined Communities: Cyberpolitics, Diaspora, and Transnational Indigeneity * The course starts during the first week of October and concludes in the second week of December, spanning 10 weeks (10 sessions). The exact days and times will be scheduled based on the availability of both the instructor and the learners. * Registered participants will receive full access to recorded session videos and all course materials. Serdar Şengül is a Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies based in Türkiye. His research lies at the intersection of the sociology of literature, Persianate studies, and Kurdish intellectual history, with a focus on pedagogy, translation, and processes of cultural mediation. Combining archival research, close textual analysis, and qualitative methodologies, his work examines the formation of literary traditions and transregional intellectual networks across Kurdish, Persian, and Turkish contexts from the early modern era to the twentieth century.