BORDERS OF MEMORY: QUEEN ZENOBIA AS A CONNECTIVE TURN IN THE DIGITAL LEGACY OF ANTIOCH-ON-THE-ORONTE - F.Z. GÜDER (n.28)

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Speaker: Prof. Dr. Feride Zeynep Güder (Üsküdar University)

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📢 Special Note: This session marks the final appointment of our current season before we transition into the next cycle of the seminar series! Join us to wrap up this incredible run.

Abstract

This study will explore the inconsistent and controversial account of Queen Zenobia's life and her digital legacy from three different memory perspectives.

First, the term "border" is used here to refer to both Antioch-on-the-Orontes' features as a border city that struggles to preserve its identity and rich cultural legacy as well as the borders of memory, which signify the forgetting and remembering cycle of history. Her legendary story inspired the Western Orientalist gaze portraying her as an exotic Queen. However, by rewriting her tale as well as by rereading her symbolic traits and various representations in the prosthetic memory of digital media as the tertiary memory, the historiographical minefield can be cleared of these disparate versions of reality (Stiegler, 2018).

Second, as a forgotten queen, she can be rediscovered in museums, coinage, and artwork that are ingrained as genius loci in Antioch-on-the-Orontes' spirit. In this context, her strong identity and heritage will be related Virginia Woolf’s “shock receiving capacity” (1985) to the Antioch women’s “suffering capacity” particularly in the earthquake time as a strong role model or a grand grandmother whose symbolic existence causes the rebirth of the resilient women as a connective turn (Hoskins, 2011) and a fertile memory (Seikaly, 1983). The enigmatic account of her death in these narrations left her like a ghost in the middle of nowhere.

Therefore, in the third approach, the Antioch-on-the-Orontes people might rewrite her narrative to construct an identity for Antioch women (Ricoeur, 1985). As part of a digital tertiary memory narration in the style of a digital funeral service, her memory merits a well-written eulogy. The goal of this trilogy method is to start several academic investigations into the ghosts of Antioch-on-the-Orontes' history and its sacred feminine landscape in mythology and history as cultural legacies like Goddess Tykee and Daphne, as well as their legacy in digital media as tertiary memory.

About the Speaker

Feride Zeynep Güder completed her PhD in Journalism (2012) at Istanbul University. In 2018, she was awarded the title of Associate Professor in Communication Studies and is currently a Full Professor at Üsküdar University, teaching in the Departments of New Media and Communication and English Translation and Interpreting at undergraduate, Master’s, and doctoral levels.

Alongside her teaching responsibilities, Güder holds key administrative positions, including Director of the Üsküdar University Solution-Oriented Women’s Studies Centre (ÜSÇÖZÜM) and Coordinator of the New Media and Urban Research Group. Her research adopts a holistic and interdisciplinary approach, with a particular focus on digital humanities, digital media, epistemology, and the philosophy of technology. Her main research interests include algorithmic culture, augmented intelligence, memory studies, critical and trustworthy artificial intelligence, neurocognitive critical epistemology, and political epistemology.

She has published extensively at both national and international levels and is the author of several influential books, including The Language of Persuasion and Media, The Watching Gaze, A Final Look at Istanbul, and Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy: Epistemological and Neuro-Cognitive Transformations. Her academic work has been recognised with major international awards, including the “Best Paper” award at the HSSMR International Conference (Barcelona, 2020). Visit her Academia profile.