Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how histories of political violence in Amed inform and are informed by notions of technoscientific expertise and the expert's subjectivity bearing upon ecological activism around the Tigris river skirting the city's historic centre.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses how histories of political violence in Amed (officially: Diyarbakır; Turkey's largest predominantly Kurdish-inhabited city) inform and are informed by notions of technoscientific expertise and the expert's subjectivity bearing upon ecological activism around the Tigris river skirting the city's historic center. Materially and spatially oriented analyses of violence tend to associate the work of experts either with the design and operation of violent infrastructures or with acts of pro-victim activism and advocacy, thereby reproducing longer-standing notions of localism or indigeneity versus universally aspiring science and expertise. The paper argues that these strict associations are complicated in Amed where expertise is an object of loss and desire as well as one of resentment and guilt or gratitude and pride.