St Andrews Koran
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The Rise of Turkish Nature Writing: Empathy Communication in Hikmet Birand and Oktay Sönmez
Living in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, the genre of nature writing has a crucial role to play in fostering a deeper connection to the natural world. Nature writing with its deep sense of time, empirical observations, and evocative descriptions, has the ability to help us think differently and to move away from ways of thinking that led to our current environmental crises. This paper will argue that Turkish nature writing is unique not only in terms of science communication, but also in terms of empathy communication, that it reveals experiences of nature as powerful, agentic, replete with an animating sensibility that makes nature speak to us.
The lecture will be presented by Professor Ufuk Özdağ (LMU München / Hacettepe-Universität Ankara) as part of the series Basics of Islam: Books organized by the Münchner Mittelost-Mittelmeer-Mittelasien-Zentrum (4MZ, Munich Middle East Mediterranean Central Asia Center).
You can find more information on the website of the Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies.