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Centre for Research on Social Inclusion
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Welcome to the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion
Dr Chris Houston, Senior Lecturer
Department of Anthropology
| Office : | C3A622 |
| Phone : | 61-(0)2-9850 8471 |
| Fax : | 61-(0)2-9850 9391 |
| email : | chris.houston@scmp.mq.edu.au |
All of my work in Turkey has been dealing with the political repercussions of Turkish Republicanism, both in terms of its excluding and assimilating nationalism and its fundamentalist secularism. For this reason I have done work on the Kurdish question in Turkey and on the politics of the Islamist social movements, both of which reveal the way Turkish politics is structured to severely limit the ability of civil society to democratically self-organize free from the heavy hand of the State.
Secondly, and as part of my research on Turkish Kemalism, I have a particular interest in the politics of the built environment and the control of space by the Republic. My research into the built environment is also seeking to take a historical turn, to examine how social actors in the late 70s used and controlled space for ideological ends in the bitter struggle between leftists and rightists leading up to the military intervention of 1980. Here I am focusing on spatial strategies of terror – bombing, segregation of space, occupation of suburbs etc. – to understand urban politics.
These two interests then – nationalism and the built environment – are of key concern in Australia as well, as we see in the Cronulla beach riots. My research interests then cohere well with a number of the centre’s guiding concerns, from Migration, Multiculturalism and Nation, The Postcolonial World and Globalisation to Inclusion and Exclusion in Urban Spaces.
Recent Publications
Books (single-authored)
Kurdistan: The Crafting of National Selves. Berg, Oxford, 2008.
Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation-State. Berg, Oxford, 2001.
Books (co-authored)
Houston, C., Kurasawa, F., & Watson, A. (eds.) Imagined Places: The Politics of Making Space. Melbourne, La Trobe University. 1998.
Refereed journal articles
'The Islam of Anthropology', The Australian Journal of Anthropology, forthcoming.
'An Anti-History of a Non-People: Kurds, Colonialism and Nationalism in the History of Anthropology', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, forthcoming.
‘Set Aside from the Pen and Cut off From the Foot’: Imagining the Ottoman Empire and Kurdistan’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27: 2, Spring 2007.
'The Never Ending Dance: Islamism, Kemalism and the Power of Self-Institution in Turkey', Australian Journal of Anthropology, 17: 2, 2006.
'Historical Agency, Nationalism, Architecture: Some Reflections on the Anthropology of Turkey in the Nineties', Die Welt das Islams, 46:1, 2006: 1-15.
'Provocations of the Built Environment: Animating Cities in Turkey as Kemalist', Political Geography, 24: 1, 2005: 101-119
'Islamism, Castoriadis and Autonomy', Thesis Eleven, 76: 1, 2004: 49-69.
'Legislating Virtue, or Fear and Loathing in Turkey?' Critique of Anthropology, 22: 4, 2002: 437-456.
'The Brewing of Islamist Differentiation: Tea Gardens and Public Space in Istanbul', Theory, Culture and Society, 18: 6, 2001: 77-97.
'Profane Intuitions: Kurdish Diaspora in the Turkish City', Australian Journal of Anthropology, 12: 1, 2001: 1-16.
'Civilizing Islam?: Turkey’s Islamist Movement and the Problem of Ethnic Difference', Thesis Eleven, 58: 1, 1999: 83-98.
'Alternative Modernities: Islamism and Secularism on Charles Taylor', Critique of Anthropology, 18: 2, June, 1998: 234-240.
'Islamic Solutions to the Kurdish Problem: Late Rendezvous or Illegitimate Shortcut?' New Perspectives on Turkey, 16, Spring, 1997: 1-22.
Book Chapters
‘Kemalist Self-Institution in Turkey: Music and Modernity’, forthcoming in Asian Modernities, Singapore University Press, 2009.
‘Visuality, Secularism and the Kurdish Question in Turkey’ (forthcoming) In Secular Publicities: Visual Practices and the Transformation of National Publics in the Middle East and South Asia, Alev Cinar & Srirupa Roy (eds.) University of Michigan Press, 2006.
‘Creating a Diaspora within a Country: Kurds in Turkey.’ In Encyclopaedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, Vol. 1, Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, & Ian Skoggard (eds.) New York, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2005: 403-414.
‘Corporate Cities – Urban Gateways or Gated Communities Against the City? The Case of Lippo, Jakarta.’ Hogan, T. & Houston, C., in Critical Reflections on Cities in Southeast Asia, Tim Bunnel, Lisa Drummond, Ho Kong Chong (eds.) Tokyo, Brill Academic Publishers, 2002: 243-264.
'Locality, Nationality, Transnationality: Kuzguncuk, Turkey, Islamistan?' In Imagined Places: The Politics of Making Space, Chris Houston, Fuyuki Kurasawa & Amanda Watson (eds.) Melbourne, La Trobe University, 1998: 131-138.
'Contesting Utopias in the Cities of Grief.' In Houston, C., Kurasawa, F. & Watson, A. (eds.) Imagined Places: The Politics of Making Space. Melbourne, La Trobe University, 1998: 105-107.
Published reports
Khirthar National Park: An Anthropological Baseline Study. Written for and published by Sindh Wildlife Department (Pakistan), 2001: 57pp.
Book Reviews
Identity Mania: Fundamentalism and the Politicization of Cultural Differences, in Australian Journal of Political Science, Volume 38: 1, 2003.
Muslim Communities in Australia, in Thesis Eleven, No. 73, 2003.
Civil Society in the Grip of Nationalism: Studies on Political Culture in Contemporary Turkey, in Thesis Eleven, No. 68, 2002.
Turkish Region: State, Market and Social Identities on the East Black Sea Coast, in The Australian Journal of Anthropology, August, Volume 13: 2, 2002.
Muslim Diaspora in the West, in Journal for Inter-Cultural Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2002.
A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, in Thesis Eleven, No. 57, 1999.
KurdishNationalism, in Journal for Inter-Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No 1, 1998.