Between the Table and the Dance Floor: Queer Diasporic World-Making through Tavern Rituals in the Netherlands with Suzi Asa

Join us for Suzi Asa’s lecture for “Exile, More Broadly: An Irregular Series” on the sensory dimensions of nightlife, including rituals of eating, drinking, and music, and what they can reveal about diasporic life and experiences of exile. Focusing on how queer diasporic subjects inhabit and reshape familiar social rituals such as gathering around a table, sharing food and alcohol, listening to music, and dancing, Suzi asks how these practices can complicate conventional ideas about nation, gender, belonging and identity, considering their experiences of living with displacement.

Dr. Suzi Asa (they/them) recently completed their PhD in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Their doctoral research explores diasporic experiences among migrants from Turkey living in the Netherlands through the rituals of meyhanes (traditional sonic taverns), where eating, drinking, singing, and dancing cultivate affective politics of belonging and displacement. Drawing on sensory ethnography and arts-based methodologies, their research examined how these rituals are transformed across generations of migration, political exile, and queer diasporic world-making. As a visual artist and researcher, they are broadly interested in the politics of knowledge production through ethnographic drawing, cultural analysis and sensory research. They hold a Research Master’s (rMA) in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Media and Visual Arts from Koç University, Turkey.

For more information, contact ebru.akcasu@aauni.edu.