Seçil Binboğa (University of Minnesota) will discuss how military cartographic techniques and technologies shaped Turkey’s national territory during the Cold War. Specifically, the talk will examine the construction of the U.S. Air Force-designed “Aircraft Control and Warning System” from 1951 to 1954, by unpacking how radar maps represented territory as a three-dimensional entity, creating a new relationship between the land and the air. In this representation, the borders of nation-states mattered only because they allowed air planners and engineers to trace the fluid frontiers of historically constituted geopolitical regions. The expanding range of air intelligence displayed on radar maps illustrates a story of U.S. expansion through Turkey’s airspace, surpassing the nation-state’s borders—an expansion that in turn allowed Turkish state makers and their military apparatus to advance their own territorial ambitions and spatial violence strategies.”
Seçil Binboğa is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Theory and serves as a Design Justice liaison at the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Seçil teaches, researches, and writes about built and cultivated environments, focusing on the transnational histories and violent repercussions of military architectures, infrastructural power, rural development, and resource extraction. Her first book project, tentatively titled Architectures of Cold War Turkey: The Soil, The River, The Sea, examines the spatial foundations of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
Register here for Seçil Binboğa's lecture
