Seeking the Phoenix in the Flames | Talk
May 24, 15:15 | Goethe-Institut
Atakan Foça & Oktay Özel
Atakan Foça & Oktay Özel
The past twenty-five years have unfolded under the shadow of successive crises: economic turmoil, political ruptures, ecological disasters, social disintegration, and new forms of reality shaped by the digital age. In a world where the boundaries of reality grow increasingly blurred and the sense of truth erodes, how can history be read? Can revisiting the past in order to make sense of the present become a pathway toward the future? This gathering invites us to reflect together on truth, history, and collective imagination in an age defined by crisis.
Atakan Foça
He graduated from the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University. He began his journalism career in 2009 as a reporter and mobile journalist, and later continued as a fact-checker after receiving training from institutions such as the BBC, M100 Sanssouci Colloquium, and Poynter. In 2015, he was awarded the Special Encouragement Award for Transparency in Media by the Transparency Association. In 2016, he founded Teyit. In 2017, he was selected as an Ashoka Fellow. In 2020, he was named one of the ten most successful young people by JCI Turkey. In 2021, he became a member of the Support and Advisory Board of Impact Hub Ankara. He continues to work on topics such as social entrepreneurship, social impact, and the digital society.
Oktay Özel
He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in the Department of History at Hacettepe University and received his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1993. He worked as a faculty member at Hacettepe and Bilkent Universities. He was a visiting researcher at Harvard and Leiden Universities. In 2018, he ended his formal ties with academia. He continues his independent research and readings on topics such as the social and demographic history of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, the history of migration and settlement in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, inter-communal relations, practices of collective violence, and issues of historiography.