Content tagged with Arlene Avakian

Writer and academic Arlene Voski Avakian, a guest in the Hrant Dink Foundation’s conversation series “Ancestral Journeys: Reflections on Land and Belonging,” spoke about the story of 1915 she heard from her grandmother, her evolving relationship with her family history over the years, and how her visits to Turkey have changed her.

As part of the Hrant Dink Foundation’s discussion series, Ancestral Journeys: Reflections on Land and Belonging, Professor Emerita Arlene Voski Avakian will speak in Istanbul on November 2 about her journey of confronting her family’s past and coming to embrace Turkey as the homeland of her ancestors.

Arlene Voski Avakian, Head of University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, came to Turkey for the first time in 2009 for attending Workshop in memory of Hrant Dink. Last summer, she went to Kastamonu, which is her family's motherland, following the traces of her family. Avakian sincerely wrote what she had been feeling before this journey, what she felt while she was seeking for the traces of her family and her encounter with the locals of Kastamonu and experience in a government office.