The Earth is our Body: Eco-Feminism, Indigenous Rights and Spirituality in Kurdish Alevism
Dr. Dilșa Deniz (Ph.D., Social Cultural Anthropology, Yeditepe University, Turkey) will discuss her recent book Shâmaran: The Neolithic Eternal Mother, Love and the Kurds in conversation with Hamoun Dolatshahi (MFA, UCLA), award winning Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker.
Time & Location
May 21, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM
University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
About the event
The third in this three-event series brings together a film screening and discussion with two lectures highlighting interdisciplinary contributions by Kurdish refugee and diasporic communities. Centering the work of award-winning Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Hamoun Dolatshahi (UC San Diego alum; MFA, UCLA) and Kurdish (Turkish) anthropologist and scholar in exile Dr. Dilşa Deniz (PhD, Yeditepe University, Istanbul; UC San Diego Scholar at Risk in Residence, 2019–2020), the series invites participants to engage questions of gender, human rights, ecology, and technology through a decolonial Kurdish lens.
Dr. Dilșa Deniz (Ph.D., Social Cultural Anthropology, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey) will discuss her recent book Shâmaran: The Neolithic Eternal Mother, Love and the Kurds (Bloomsbury, 2024) in conversation with Hamoun Dolatshahi (MFA, UCLA), award winning Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker. Bringing together Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and gender and religious studies, the book offers both a foundational study of pre-Islamic Kurdish mythological traditions from a feminist and decolonial perspective, and "mytho-ethnography" as new methodological framework for the study of oral and sacred knowledge from a feminist and decolonial perspective.
Location: Coalition Building (COA B17)