Research Colloquium with Özge Sezer
On Wednesday, May 3rd, between 11:00 and 12:30, the first Research Colloquium of the Spring Semester 2023 will take place. Our Guest, Özge Sezer from the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU), will present her recent research project. The title of this talk is "Trajectories of Rural Planning through the Lenses of Modernization and Nation-Building.”
If you are interested in this topic, don't miss out on the chance to meet Özge Sezer and learn from her experience. Following the presentation, the floor will be open to questions and discussion.
The Research Colloquium will take place on campus at Salzufer 6, 10587 Berlin, in Studio 3.
Students across all disciplines—Interior Design, Architecture, Graphic Design & Visual Communication, Data Science, and Business Administration—are invited to participate in an interdisciplinary exchange. Be inspired and get to know new perspectives!
About the talk
Besides romanticized references, rural life fundamentally occurred in state interventions legitimizing the development programs for country planning from the late nineteenth century. Expropriation of the rural areas, new agricultural practices, and settlement formations were generated as an inseparable part of the modernization and nation-building agendas of the states. In many examples, rural planning emerged as formal and informal processes of modernity. Following this line of thought, Özge Sezer scrutinizes rural planning as a tool for regulating the demographic, social, and economic engineering in the first half of the twentieth century, capturing the common "governmentalities" in the European context and its geographical and political extensions. In doing so, she aims to critically bring forward the concepts and scope of implementations to form an idealized built environment in the rural space.
About Özge Sezer
Dr. phil. Özge Sezer was born in 1984. She completed her Master's degree in Architectural History at Istanbul Technical University in 2010. In 2018, she successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation titled "Idealization of the Land: Forming the Rural Settlements in Early Republican Period of Turkey, 1923–1950)" at Berlin Technical University. In her thesis, she focused on modernist and nationalist state interventions in rural Turkey and demonstrated planned rural settlements as significant examples of early republican agenda. From 2007 to 2014, Dr. Sezer worked as an architect, focusing on restoration and conservation projects of historic buildings and archaeological sites.
In 2017 and 2019, she served as an Adjunct Lecturer in History and Theory of Art and Architecture at Berlin International University of Applied Sciences. Since January 2020, she has been a post-doctoral researcher in the DFG (German Research Foundation) Research Training Group 1913 - "Cultural and Technological Significance of Historic Buildings" at Brandenburg University of Technology.