Archiving Loss After a Catastrophe: Digital Memory Maps and Minority Witnessing in Post-Earthquake Antakya

When the February 2023 earthquakes destroyed Antakya in southern Turkey, the city’s minority communities turned to digital platforms to document what official narratives obscured: unrecovered bodies, minority dispossession, and histories of coexistence at risk of erasure. This talk examines crowdsourced digital mapping initiatives that emerged in the aftermath as forms of post-disaster archiving. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative involvement in several of these efforts, I analyze how these projects mobilize distinct temporal and spatial logics in response to catastrophic loss, functioning as memorials and evidentiary repositories but also as platforms for community reassembly across dispersed geographies. Rather than simply preserving the past, they reactivate pre-earthquake lifeworlds, document ongoing loss, and contest state-produced absences through intimate knowledge and collective claim-making. The talk also touches on the politics of digitization, showing how digital archives depend on place-based memories, embodied knowledge, and community labor for their creation and survival, even as they enable marginalized voices to circulate beyond official channels. Moving beyond frameworks that treat minority archives primarily as sites of preservation or future repair, I reconceptualize archival labor in zones of catastrophe as a multitemporal practice operating across retrospective, immediate, and anticipatory registers.

Partner: Secil Dagtas, Waterloo University, Canada