Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul | Mine Yıldırım

E588 | What does canine life reveal about the human worlds of modern Istanbul? In this special collaboration with Keyman Podcast at Northwestern University, we sit down with Mine Yıldırım, curator of the exhibition "Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul," to discuss the intersecting histories of cruelty and compassion towards animals in Turkey's largest city from the late Ottoman period to the present. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/dogs.html Mine Yıldırım is an assistant professor (Kadir Has University, Istanbul) of politics, researcher in urban and critical animal studies, and animal rights advocate. She received her PhD in Politics (2021) from The New School, New York, with a dissertation titled Between Care and Violence: Street Dogs of Istanbul, tracing the history and politics of Istanbul’s street dogs from the early twentieth century to today. Her research examines urban animal worlds, myriad entanglements of law, politics, everyday practices in the making of trans-species bonds, affective regimes of labor, killing and caring traversing human and more-than-human worlds. Her work, drawing on ethnographic and historical approaches, has appeared in books, journals, exhibits, and radio broadcasts, bridging academic research with community-based animal rights advocacy. Her archive research Between Care and Violence: Street Dogs of Istanbul was recently exhibited in Lives of Animals (curated by Joanna Zielinska) at Salt Beyoğlu (2025). She is currently preparing a book manuscript of the same title and developing archival and ethnographic research-led curatorial practices to integrate animal rights advocacy to broader publics in contemporary arts, humanities and social sciences. Önder Eren Akgül is a historian of capitalism, political economy, and the environment in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East. He received his Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University in 2022. He is currently the 2024-2026 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, where he is working on his first book manuscript examining the development of a socio-legal order rooted in austerity, violence, and dispossession in the Late Ottoman Empire. CREDITS Episode No. 588 Release Date: 13 June 2026 Recording Location: Istanbul Sound production by Can Gümüş Music courtesy of Sato Moughalian Bibliography and images courtesy of Mine Yıldırım