Renowned US anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj will deliver the keynote address at Boğaziçi University’s 2025 Hrant Dink Memorial Conference, taking place online on Thursday evening, 24 April, at 18:30 local time (GMT+3). The talk, titled “Where Is ‘The Conscience of Humanity’ Going? Gaza and the Refusal of Genocide”, will be held in English with simultaneous Turkish translation.
Organised by Boğaziçi University’s departments of Political Science, Sociology, and History, the annual conference commemorates journalist Hrant Dink, a prominent advocate for Armenian-Turkish reconciliation who was assassinated in 2007.
El-Haj, a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University and co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies, is widely known for her award-winning books on archaeology, race science, and war trauma. Her lecture will address what she terms the “refusal of genocide” in public discourse surrounding Israel’s actions in Gaza—nearly eighteen months after the mass killing of Palestinians, which she argues is largely excluded from Western political debate.
Rather than focusing on explicit denial, El-Haj’s talk will examine why the question of genocide is avoided entirely in mainstream Western spaces. She traces this silence to transformations in post-WWII Euro-American political and moral frameworks.
Past speakers at the conference include global intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, and Etienne Balibar, underscoring the event’s critical role in spotlighting human rights and historical justice.
