NICAST Episode 1: “The Future of Cultural Analysis”
with Murat Aydemir and Aylin Kuryel
NICAst is hosted by Pepita Hesselberth, Joost de Bloois and Benjamin Schoonenberg.
This first episode of NICast features a conversation with Murat Aydemir and Aylin Kuryel about their forthcoming book (edited together with Noa Roei) titled The Future of Cultural Analysis: A Critical Inquiry. The conversation between Aydemir, Kuryel, Hesselberth and De Bloois covers a broad range of topics and questions:
- What does the future of cultural analysis look like?
- What are its current challenges?
- How can pedagogy be a way to respond to those challenges, and how can you construct new forms of teaching, as well as new ways of doing cultural analysis?
- How does cultural analysis today hold up to its inception – as originated in the second half of the nineties?
- And what do we do when concepts go “bad” and get adopted in mainstream discourse, or by political actors we strongly disagree with?
Murat Aydemir and Aylin Kuryel in conversation about their forthcoming book The Future of Cultural Analysis: A Critical Inquiry.
This episode’s guests are:
Murat Aydemir
Murat Aydemir is associate professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is the author of Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning (Minnesota University Press, 2004) and the (co)editor of Migratory Settings: Transnational Perspectives on Place (Brill, 2008) and Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (Brill, 2011). From 2011 to 2021, he served as academic director of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).
Aylin Kuryel
Aylin Kuryel is an Assistant Professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research areas are nationalism, image politics, aesthetics/resistance, and politics of emotions. She is the co-editor of Utanca Bakmak (Looking at Shame, Cogito, 2023), Sıkıntı Var (Essays on Boredom, İletişim Press, 2020), Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences (Türkiye’de Yahudi Olmak: Bir Deneyim Sözlüğü, Iletisim Press, 2017), Küresel Ayaklanmalar Çağında Direniş ve Estetik (Resistance and Aesthetics in the Age of Global Uprisings, İletişim Press, 2015), and Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010). She has been involved in projects as an artist and is working as a documentary filmmaker. Among her documentaries are The City and the Messiah (2024), Translating Ulysses (2023), A Defense (2021), CemileSezgin (2020), The Balcony and Our Dreams (2020), Heads and Tails (2018), Welcome Lenin (2016).