Bio | Research

Abdulkerim Pusat is a refugee sociologist from Kurdistan and a Hestia junior researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), where he is part of the IMAGINART group project. He received a master’s degree in Secondary Education – Teaching in Social Areas, after which he worked as a high school teacher. During this time, he wrote about culture, society, ethics, music, and other topics for various magazines, websites, and newspapers. He has been living in the Netherlands as a refugee since 2016 while regularly writing columns for Kurdish newspapers and websites.

What follows gives a fuller sense of his work and concerns.

When he was in Turkey, Abdulkerim was a Human Rights activist. He worked on the enforced disappearances that came to stand for the massive human rights violations of Turkey’s civil war against Kurds during the 1990s. He worked with the relatives of those who were disappeared by the state’s formal and informal security forces. He has participated in producing several reports documenting the state’s human rights violations with the Human Rights Association, Human Rights Foundation, and other NGOs. Because of these human rights activities, the Turkish government has fired and persecuted Abdulkerim and his family.

Abdulkerim is deeply preoccupied with ethical issues. He has worked for a long time against state and male violence. As Kurdistan is divided into four, whose life is divided into a hundred pieces, and whose personality is fragmented, he also deals with the sociological problem of otherness and identity.

Contact: a.pusat@uva.nl