Jennifer Hattam

Uprisings across the Arab world, financial crises in Europe, and the growing threat of environmental disasters have shaken confidence in the global economic system, calling into question its ability to generate long-term prosperity and stability. Forum participants. Photo: AWID Over the weekend, some 2,000 women from around the world -- former presidents and indigenous leaders, media executives and advocates for sex workers, academics and activists -- gathered in Istanbul to explore new ways to create a stronger, more equitable economy amid these societal upheavals. I covered the 12th Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) International Forum for the Inter Press Service (IPS) News Agency , writing one story about gender budgeting -- a wonky-sounding topic that has very real impact on women's lives -- and one wrap-up of the weekend's discussions and debates. Over the coming weeks, I'll be following up on some of the wealth of story ideas generated...

Sweet-toothed Istanbul residents lined up recently in Taksim Square for a sticky, gooey bite from a 73-meter-long künefe – one meter for every year that the province of Hatay has been a part of Turkey. A popular dessert made with different variations across the Middle East, künefe ’s Turkish version – thin strands of shredded dough encasing a layer of soft cheese, baked and drenched in sugar syrup – reaches its greatest culinary heights in Hatay, a southern province famed for its distinctive regional cuisine. The künefe at the “Hatay Days in Istanbul” celebration was cooked in 43 large round pans, using 172 kilograms of layered pastry, 172 kilograms of syrup, and 85 kilograms of cheese, according to local news reports... Read the rest of my guest post " A Monster-sized Dessert Strikes the Heart of Istanbul " on EurasiaNet's " Kebabistan " food blog.

I can feel the small bird trembling as I hold it in my cupped hands and walk outside the weathered metal trailer to release it. Bits of feathers explode off its back as it hurriedly takes flight into the crisp, clean air of remote northeast Turkey. Inside the trailer, Sedat blows gently on the underside of a penduline tit, ruffling the bird’s feathers back from its belly to reveal a tiny round bulge beneath the skin. “It’s going to be a mother,” he says with a smile. The area around Kars has a bleak reputation, in part due to Orhan Pamuk’s dark portrayal in his acclaimed novel Snow . And while winters are indeed harsh, with up to four months of snow and temperatures plummeting as low as -40˚C, the vast landscape of high plateaus and green lowlands comes to life vividly in the spring.... Read the rest of my article about exploring Kars's wild side, which appeared in the March 2012 issue of Time Out Istanbul , as a  jpg  or  pdf , or click "Read more" below for ...

Do Middle Eastern aesthetic values hinder the development of contemporary art? Is the art collector an artist in her own right? Is China set to dominate the world art market? Those are just a few of the provocative questions posed by speakers at Contemporary Istanbul , a high-profile art fair held most recently in November. The 6th edition of the annual event drew 62,000 art lovers and 2,100 collectors to view works exhibited by 90 contemporary art galleries from 20 countries. Also featured were a series of dialogues between artists, collectors, curators, and other art-world figures, discussions I covered for Selections , a Beirut-based luxury lifestyle magazine. Three of my articles appeared in the "Art Scene" section of the magazine's Winter 2011/2012 issue: "The Culture of Criticism"* - jpg | pdf "Redrawing the Map of the Art World" - jpg | pdf "The Art of Collecting" - jpg | pdf * Unfortunately, the last paragraph of this a...

In the minds of most tourists, the words "dance" and "Istanbul" probably conjure up not-terribly-authentic images of belly dancers, or perhaps, for the more culturally astute, the whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi order. Few would likely suspect that they could find a roomful of young Turks enthusiastically doing the lindy hop , a style of swing dance that originated in the Harlem ballrooms of the 1920s and 1930s. I discovered the Swing Istanbul studio after being approached by the editor of Dance Gazette , the magazine of the Royal Academy of Dance in the U.K., with an assignment to identify and profile an interesting "dance tribe" in the city. My piece about the Istanbul lindy-hoppers appears as part of the cover story for the magazine's February 2012 issue, along with dispatches from a male hula class in New York, a zumba class in Sydney, an experimental-art mecca in Shanghai, and a group of London zombies who just love Michael Jackson. Read my li...

Reporting on environmental issues in Turkey can be a lonely pursuit (and can sometimes feel like a lost cause), so it's always gratifying to have my work for TreeHugger.com cited by people I respect. Writing about the resignation-under-pressure of a longtime Turkish columnist who had "railed against the Prime Minister and other government officials for their plan to build a series of controversial dams in a scenic part of northeastern Turkey," journalist Yigal Schleifer linked to one of my TreeHugger posts as context for the story: On a related note, Jennifer Hattam of the TreeHugger blog has a great post up about just what is happening with the dam project that [columnist Oktay] Ekşi wrote about and why people are getting so fired up about the government's actions on the issue. More recently, acclaimed Turkish environmentalist Çağan Şekercioğlu linked to my reports on his latest research in his own write-up for National Geographic NewsWatch.

From fine dining and dance subcultures in Istanbul to camel wrestling on the Aegean and hiking through 10,000 years of history in Southeast Turkey, I covered a lot of ground with my writing this year. Updating part of the Fodor's Turkey guidebook took me from Roman ruins to World War II battlefields, with days chock-full of chatting up hoteliers, restaurant workers, and tour guides in between. Stories about my adventures watching camel wrestling , a traditional sport on Turkey's Aegean coast, and exploring Hasankeyf , an ancient city slated for submersion by a dam, found a home in the pages of Time Out Istanbul . In Istanbul, I wrote about garden tours on the Princes' Islands for Time Out Istanbul , lavish Bosphorus weddings for J Magazine , local lindy-hoppers for Dance Gazette , and the Contemporary Istanbul art fair for Selections (the last two to be published soon). I also updated Istanbul restaurant listings for the Zagat guide and penned a guest review of one of m...