Prof. Dr Deniz Göktürk: "Community beyond Fantasies of Closure"
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Prof. Dr Deniz Göktürk gave a lecture at the European University Viadrina on 1 July 2026, exploring how communities can be understood beyond exclusion and closure, drawing on literature, film, philosophy and border theory.
Prof. Dr Deniz Göktürk (University of California, Berkeley, Department of German)
In an age of fortified borders, detention regimes and renewed calls for war in the name of ‘total security’, how might we rethink community beyond fantasies of closure? Drawing on Franz Kafka, Tadhg O’Sullivan, Eyal Weizman, Helmuth Plessner and others, this lecture explores how communities are shaped not by seamless unity, but by distance, mediation and partial perspectives. Bringing literature, film, philosophy and border theory into dialogue, Deniz Göktürk asks how civic life can be sustained without exclusion, purification or fear.
Research Factory B/ORDERS IN MOTION
Deniz Göktürk, who holds a Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin and is Professor of German / Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley, specialises in cultural and media studies, focusing on moving images, multilingual literature, and theories of migration, social interaction and aesthetic practice within a global context. Publications include a book on literary and cinematic representations of America in early twentieth-century German culture, translations from Turkish literature, and co-edited volumes: The German Cinema Book (BFI 2002, expanded 2nd edition 2019); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007); Transit Deutschland: Debates on Nation and Migration (2011); Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (Routledge 2010); The Comedy of Integration: Boundary Practices of Community (2019). Her book Framing Migration: Seven Takes on Movement and Borders is forthcoming from De Gruyter.
Moderator: Prof. Dr Kira Kosnick (Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION)