Two opposing yet inseparable forces shape the lives, movements, bodies, and health of street dogs and their relationships with humans and other non-human inhabitants: care and violence. This tension defines their births, illnesses, and deaths, underscoring the fragile balance between these conflicting but interconnected dynamics. On one side, violence manifests itself as the state’s destructive power over street dogs, exercised through local governments and fluctuating in intensity over time. Spatial regulations increasingly restrict the freedom of these animals, reinforcing a politics of displacement, isolation, and extermination. Policies and narratives dictate where, how, and under what conditions they should live and die. On the other side, care emerges as a quiet but persistent resistance to state-imposed violence, rooted in the profound affective bonds between humans and animals. Simple yet widespread daily acts sustain and protect street dogs, allowing them not just to survive, but to live. Despite the growing systematization of violence, care and compassion for animals remain the primary force that enables their continued presence in the city, fostering coexistence in defiance of violence.
Dr. Mine Yıldırım charts the history of street dogs in Istanbul, from 1910 to the present, stemming from her unique PhD research which explored affective and political landscapes that shape the lives of Istanbul’s street dogs. Tracing its origins to the 1910 Hayırsızada Incident – when over 80,000 street dogs were exiled to Oxia, the city’s smallest and most remote island, and left to die – her research traces the enduring interplay between care and violence encompassing canine lives in the city.
This keynote lecture brings Athens and Istanbul into the same frame— as two Mediterranean urban worlds where street dogs have repeatedly become objects of governance, conflict, and solidarity. Dr. Mine Yıldırım traces how debates over public space, “nuisance,” safety, and belonging often crystallize around dogs, and how civic protest and everyday caregiving can counter these pressures through informal infrastructures of care. Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul explores the persistence of decanisation policies, their contradictions and reversals, and the progressive restriction of street animals’ spaces and freedoms despite a longstanding culture of care and protection in two cities.
Drawing on visual archives, newspapers, municipal documents, veterinary records, legal petitions, citizen letters, satirical pieces, laments, and public reactions—alongside oral histories, field notes, and personal accounts—the lecture foregrounds witnessing both as a historiographical method and radical politics. By tracking the echoes between Athens and Istanbul—biopolitical regulation, contested street life, civic resistance, and emergent multispecies solidarities—this talk proposes a wider inquiry into how urban communities negotiate vulnerability, cohabitation, and justice. Here, the archive becomes not only a record of loss, but also a generative site for imagining more just multispecies futures.
Dr. Mine Yıldırım is an academic, researcher in urban and critical animal studies, and an advocate for animal rights. 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 project Between Care and Violence: Street Dogs of Istanbul was recently exhibited in Lives of Animals at SALT Beyoğlu (2025). She is currently preparing a book manuscript of the same title and developing curatorial practices to open research on animals to wider publics.
The lecture will be held in English
Admission is free, online booking essential.
