Just before the local elections in March 2019, İlay Aksoy, a founder of the nationalist İyi Party and mayoral candidate for Istanbul’s Fatih Municipality, displayed campaign banners reading, “We will not concede Fatih to the Syrians” throughout the busiest points of the district. Her subsequent campaign speeches, rallies, and social media posts came to employ […]
How To Build Trust During a Pandemic
Drawing lessons from the 2014 Ebola Outbreak In a virtual event on Coronavirus and Conflict hosted by the United States Institute of Peace, Jeremy Konyndyk, Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development, talked about the importance of “building trust” during crisis response. He drew an example from the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the […]
Ayogya: Nepal’s Disenfranchised Ex-Combatants
In March 2019, Rukmini Banerjee (President of HasNa) traveled to Nepal to attend the South Asian Regional Institute for the Study and Practice of Strategic Nonviolent Action organized by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Center for Social Change, National Network for the Families of the Disappeared, and Department of Conflict, Peace, and Development Studies, […]
Hamzah Jamjoom: The Ego
On January 9, Busboys and Poets (Takoma) hosted a conversation between the Saudi filmmaker Hamzah Jamjoom and John Hanshaw, Founder of the Washington Film Institute. Born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Hamzah Jamjoom is a writer, director, and actor currently based in Chicago. From a young age, Hamzah exposed himself to the art of storytelling and […]
The Power of Storytelling
On May 21, 2015, HasNa screened Hüseyin Karabey’s 2014 Turkish film, “Come to My Voice,” at the Avalon Theater in Washington, DC. It is a simple enough premise, but powerful in its ability to bring to light the realities of a typical Kurdish village’s unfortunate interactions with police through a storyline that seems at once […]
Education: A Promising Journey
As the only city to reside on two continents, Europe and Asia; Istanbul is unique in the world. Everyday millions of people living in Istanbul commute from one continent to the other for work, school and fun. I was one of those commuters when I lived in Istanbul. My parents lived on the Asian side […]
Announcing HasNa’s Citizen Journalism Training Program
The ways we conduct journalism, activism, and storytelling have changed drastically in recent years. HasNa’s Citizen Journalism Training Program—or “Gorilla Activism” as it is being called in Cyprus—is an 8-day workshop that began June 20th. The program was developed in conjunction with the Management Centre and Cyprus Community Media Centre in Cyprus to empower Cypriot […]