A. Karabiyik (Aybüke) MA

I am a Swiss scholar with Turkish origins working on contemporary Indigenous literatures from Turtle Island. I hold a bachelor’s degree in English and Social Work and Policy, as well as a master’s degree in English, both from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. In my Master’s thesis, I analyzed Driftpile Cree Nation author Billy-Ray Belcourt’s depiction of the Indigiqueer body in his poetry and life writing.

In my PhD project, tentatively titled "Indigenous Ecologies of Digital Technologies: Towards a Critical Appreciation of Contemporary Apocalyptic Indigenous Literatures," I investigate how the imbrications between digital technologies, its contexts, its agents, and its uses inform the conceptualization of apocalypse in contemporary Indigenous literatures. I am interested in how authors and their characters challenge the settler colonial exclusion of Indigeneity from technological frameworks, and in how digital technologies function as key mechanisms through which authors and characters articulate visions of survivance, sovereignties, and decolonial futurities. In addition, I am also interested in how digital technologies intersects with core Indigenous values, such as the relationships with the more-than-human, including land, water, and non-human animals, which are crucial aspects for understanding how Indigenous literatures transcend the settler binary of nature vs. technology. To explore these aspects of apocalyptic Indigenous writing, I will define how the relational and place-based Indigenous knowledges inform the incorporation and use of technologies in describing and imagining pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic, and post-apocalyptic worlds. My work is anchored in the observation that contemporary Indigenous authors and scholars intentionally equate settler colonialism with apocalypse. I am therefore interested in the theoretical and political visions of the present and future they put forward in contemporary literary works.