Images of children reoccur with striking frequency in early Turkish Republican cartoons. Following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, numerous social and political reforms were enacted throughout the 1920s that enabled the new Republic to cut its ties with the previous regime and modernize the nation. Cartoons illustrating the reforms and the modernization process often turned to the image of the child to convey their messages: using the child as a symbol of positive abstract notions such as the future, potentiality, hope, and metaphoric equations to the young Republic. Additionally, cartoonists relied on the image of the child to communicate more direct and literal messages relating to education and initiation into the modern world through the modern Republic. Drawing from a number of political cartoons published in satirical journals such as Karag?z, Akbaba, and Papaaan this study focuses on two different approaches to the use of the child's image. First, it will reveal how the newly established Republic was viewed as a child. Such a comparison serves both to inject the image and identity of the Republic with the aforementioned notions of hope, potentiality, and brightness while also emphasizing its break with the past. Thus, far from the Ottoman Empire that was known as the "sick man of Europe," the new Republic identifies itself as a youthful, energetic, and dynamic child of the future. Secondly, this investigation will explore how these cartoons used the image of the child in a literal manner when discussing the reforms. The child was seen as a commodity and future agent of the Republic, its mind and heart like a sponge, a lump of clay, or a tabula rasa; thus ready, able, and eager to be indoctrinated into the new ideology during this time of great change. The cross-section of these two analyses will likewise provide valuable insight concerning the creation of the Republican identity around concepts of renewal, reform, and forward motion all exemplified by the image of the young child.

This paper will explore how select filmmakers of the Iranian New Wave offer a complex and nuanced view of gender identity in the Middle East. It will argue that they have created a distinct postmodern cinema that fuses European neo-realist visual elements with traditional Iranian storytelling forms that are complex reflections on human emotion. Like Abbas Kiorastami, they create visual cinematic poems often with children as the central characters. But while the directors of The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi, 1995), The Girl with the Sneakers (Rasul Sadrameli, 2000), The Circle (2000, Jafar Panahi) and The Day I became a Woman (Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001), also employ adolescents or children to critique contemporary society; they present viewers with a complex portrait of gender in contemporary Iran. I suggest that they offer a more nuanced view of the Iranian public sphere and of the girls and young women who quickly move through its center or inhabit its margins. They do so by creating an open narrative--a story with no clear beginning and no neat resolution. These directors communicate more through the characters' ambiguous visual gestures than through plot or dialogue. In other words, Meshkini, Panahi and Sadrameli do not follow the Hollywood narrative style nor do they give us a Bergman-like portrait of the characters' inner turmoil. As such, these films do not contain the obvious political commentary that directors in the West might have imparted (as in the neo-liberal films of Doris D rrie and other European directors). Though the films of the New Wave reflect a distinct Iranian aesthetic, the lack of narrative resolution is very much in keeping with earlier principles established by "Third Cinema" non-Western filmmakers. While the latter championed the oppressed, many did not provide obvious solutions as to how those politically marginalized should remedy their situations. As noted by Julie F. Codell (2007), "the goal of Third Cinema was to activate spectators to become agents of their own political destiny through a democratized cinema" (p. 361). Although young Iranian women and girls are hardly agents of their own destinies in contemporary New Wave Iranian cinema, nevertheless directors of these films suggest the possibility that they have some control over their choices and thus their lives. In this regard, the cinematic screen functions as a site for public discourse----something that earlier Third World directors would have undoubtedly applauded.

While formal schooling spearheaded the Islamic Republic of Iran's efforts to inculcate future generations in the ideology and values of the state following the 1979 Revolution, state socialization of the "children of the revolution" was not confined to textbooks and curriculum alone. This paper compares the images and messages found in postrevolutionary Farsi textbooks (Grades 1-3) with children's television programming broadcast in the IRI during the years 1979-1999. We argue that the religious and political messages found in both mediums were highly inconsistent over this period, and in the case of textbooks, greatly unstable. Far from constructing a coherent message as to what comprises the ideal Islamic Citizen, as is often presumed or asserted in the literature, textbooks and television in the first two decades of IRI rule combined to reveal a state cultural apparatus that was far from coherent or even always Islamic in character. Inconsistencies in the formal ideology of the state provided opportunities for parents and their children to develop subjectivities separate from that of the state, and to even use everyday programs such as children's cartoons as a refuge from political and social indoctrination.

This paper will explore the representation of childhood in illustrated children's books that are published in Turkey with the aim of teaching children basic tenets of Islam. These extremely popular Islamic picture books, mostly published in Istanbul and distributed all around Turkey, have been serving not only as an alternative method of teaching children general principles of Islam and Sunni practices. They have also been vital channels through which "the Islamic way of life" -as understood by the publishers and writers of these books- has been transmitted to younger generations since the early 1990s. These illustrated books, which are products of the Islamic market which emerged in the context neo-liberal economic context in Turkey, contain much more attractive and colorful imagery as opposed to illustrated textbooks published by the state-administered Presidency of Religious Affairs as well as earlier Islamic picture books published by private publishing houses. As visual and textual transmitters of new images of childhood, these books convey specific role models of adults, gender relationships and family environments, which are considered by their writers, illustrators and publishers as "Islamic". The paper will analyze how this "Islamic" difference is constructed in these books' representations of childhood and how these representations differed from both children's books which are published by the state and the ones which were published by the same Islamic publishers prior to the 1990s.

On Civil Wars, Refugee Camps and Children's Ordinary Lives This talk is about the content of the photographs that I took shortly after the war between Hezbollah and Israel in the summer of 2006, and in the Palestinian Refugee Camps between 2004 and 2009. The photographs portray the lives of children who had to deal with war's devastating realities intruding in their daily lives. Whereas the media typically covers the Middle East in a sensational manner: terrorism, bombings and kidnappings, the large majority of the inhabitants are just ordinary people going on with their everyday lives. War is only half the story; the other half, the aftermath, is often ignored and forgotten. It could be any war and any time. Once it ends, it fades from public attention. The people who lived and suffered through it become forgotten. They have to deal with the reality of their loss and the difficult task of rebuilding their shattered lives, while the world's attention moves on to the next crisis. Through my images I hope to honor the children of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon who have dealt with the war's devastating realities intruding in their daily lives. These children have incredible capacity to adapt to their circumstances and to make the best of the little the camps offer them.