Zeynep AKGÜL

Ankara- The project called “Women's Media and Women’s Memory” is available on the project’s website Bizimhikayemiz.org. The aim of the project is to make the unseen women’s history visible. Women's stories are collected in an archive that is accessible to everyone. Meral Camcı, Nuray Türkmen, Çiğdem Anad, Burçe Çelik, Esra Dabağcı, Tül Akbal, Didem Dayı, Aslı Takanay, and Şahika Erkonan conduct the oral history interviews of the project, which is carried out with the support of Loughborough University. We talk to Esra Dabağcı and Aslı Takanay about the aim of the project and what the authoritarianism has changed in the lives of women in Turkey.

•The project called “Women's Media and Women’s Memory” is available on the project’s website Bizimhikayemiz.org. How was this project formed? From where did you get inspired? Can you share the process with us?

Aslı T.: The project has been shaped in need of creating an accessible resource, a corpus, and an archive in which women can write and tell their own stories and histories. Women's personal histories shed light on understanding in social life and can reveal what is invisible in the literature of history. It is possible to see such kind of digital archives in various countries. We checked these archives and thought about what we can do, how we can do it. One of the biggest sources of inspiration was the Mass Observation Archive, which started to be created in the 1930s in the UK, and its aim was to create a study of the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain.

There are many common points in women's experiences

• Olympe de Gouges, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Coffin, Clara Zetkin… The women’s struggle is at the exact center of these stories. First of all, the struggle of every woman is against the patriarchal order that is always against them and tries to categorize them. Their stories turn into a struggle according to the period they were born, the place they live, the language they speak, and their belief. Maybe we should talk about different women's experiences, not just one to have a more inclusive women's solidarity. Do you interview with women having different experiences? Can you share those experiences with us?

Esra D.: Of course, women’s struggle works against the patriarchal order, but unfortunately, not all women's stories are against this order. Besides, we cannot expect this to happen. The story itself is a complicated and dynamic network. Sometimes, it happens in the form of escaping, abandoning or taking shelter. Surely, sometimes all of these can happen at the same time in women's stories. For this reason, although the experiences may be “different” from each other, there are many common points in women's experiences.

We work on expanding the profile based on their class and identity variables in the differentiation of experiences. This comprehensiveness also offers us a variety of experiences at the level of class and identity differences.

• I think you are focusing on the effects of the last 20 years on women in this project. Can we say that the essence of the project consists of this?

Aslı T.: The essence of our work is to be able to convey the stories of women with their own narratives and their own voices, about what they experience in their life in the past and present and how they rebuild their lives and themselves. I think that this archive of women’s stories will be accessible to all of us on a platform where we can listen to each other and hear each other, and thus, the archive will be a window for us to learn from each other and to not feel alone.

While carrying out our work in this way, certainly, we also tended to think about the transformative effects of certain periods on women's lives, and we included the question of how this change occurred in the last 20 years. At a period when women say at every opportunity that their living spaces have been restricted, that they are murdered, harassed and that the numbers of unemployment and insecurity jobs for women have been increasing, especially in the last 20 years, learning the story of the last 20 years is essentially an obligation and responsibility in terms of women's history.

“Stories uncover the social dynamic in many ways”

• May we say you are working on what authoritarianism changes in women’s lives in Turkey?

Esra D.: Our Story shows us various aspects of authoritarianism in Turkey through women’s stories. While understanding how the dominant authoritarian approach becomes manifest in the lives of women, we also see that actually the historical part of this authoritarian approach dates back old times and that it never stops in the past and in the last 20 years but it makes chronic the last 20 years.

In addition, we can see that each repressive era produces its own liberation-empowerment experiences. This last 20-30 years old period also brings the experience of urbanization and even metropolitanization along with itself. The narratives and our stories also uncover this social dynamic in many ways.

• The project is carried out by Meral Camcı, Nuray Türkmen, Çiğdem Anad, Burçe Çelik, Esra Dabağcı, Tül Akbal, Didem Dayı, Aslı Takanay and Şahika Erkonan. How did these women come together?

Aslı T.: After the project proceeded to combine the personal and social histories of women with social sciences, media practice and activism, the first connections were established among Burçe, who conducts media and history research at Loughborough University, journalist Çiğdem who lives in Cambridge and Tül, who is one of the founders of the Kampüssüzler (Campusless). Then, the team grew, activist researchers, members of the Kampüssüzler, and Şahika, a Ph.D. student at Loughborough University joined us. We made decisions together on detailing the project, determining its routes and how it would be carried out.

“As if the stories started talking to each other”

• Through this project, you show how “ordinary” lives are actually not ordinary and how they are shaped by separate struggles. When you started this project, what were your thoughts and plans regarding the content on the website, how did you write your first story and how was your website shaped by the stories told over time?

Esra D.: As we told before, while we see that each story creates its own form of struggle, its means, we also see the connection of the “ordinariness” of every woman’s story with the “ordinariness” of the patriarchy in these lands. We think women’s efforts to make this connection and the network behind it are very impressive and precious and eventually, we hope this will contribute to our collective struggle in some way. Meanwhile, we did not write the “first story” or the next ones, we just tried to create a space for women’s stories, we just mediated it. Also, as women who listened to and recorded stories in different cities during the same processes, there was no “first” story for us. In the same process, more than one story was recorded and reached. After a while, it was as if the stories started to talk to each other.

“Narrators open a window from their present to their past”

• What are the contents of women’s stories?

Esra D.: Stories consist of the experiences of women depending on the places and times they lived.  In other words, they all have experiences in different places and different time zones. They consist of homes, villages, cities, streets, workplaces, having children, being married, harassment, rape, all kinds of violence, laughter, enthusiasm, mourning, struggle, solidarity, stubbornness, and persistence, standing up again despite everything, in shortly, they consist of the experiences of all places and times. We think/ we hope that Our Story opens a self-reflexive window to both narrators and listeners through women's own narratives. Narrators open a window from their present into their past.

“We are open to cooperation”

• Do you have other projects about delivering stories? What kind of path do you intend to follow?

Aslı T.: During that period, we tried to introduce and share the platform by organizing meetings with many women’s organizations. Our aim is to strengthen women's organization through this archive and stories and to empower women to organize themselves by learning the stories. Surely, the women’s organizations will decide how and in what way this can happen. As Our Story Platform, we are open to cooperation