Jennifer Hattam

Sosin and her family moved from rural Turkey to Istanbul, the country's largest city, and for four years she did not leave the house, not even to buy food for her children. "I was afraid to be lost. I never saw any place outside the house. We would be starving with the children until evening when my husband would come home," she told researchers... The plight of poor women who have moved to Istanbul from rural Anatolia was among the many sad, fascinating, and empowering stories I encountered while covering the recent 12th Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) International Forum in Istanbul. After attending an activist-led talk on "The impact on women's rights of economic underdevelopment and forced migration in the Kurdish region of Turkey," I delved into the topic of Turkey's female migrants, publishing a piece for Women's eNews that was also picked up by United Press International (UPI) and the Thomson Reuters Foundati...

Arriving late for a studio visit scheduled during the Contemporary Istanbul art fair last fall turned out to be a stroke of luck. The organized group of art lovers had already breezed in and out, leaving sculptor Sibel Horada free to give me a relaxed one-on-one interview over tea. After a private screening of the old-fashioned slideshow that made up part of her recent installation work " Urban Knights ," we lounged on the antique button-tufted sofa that also featured in the piece and chatted about Beyoğlu's mysteriously disappearing tables , the sacredness of street cats and old chairs, sculpting with marble, and learning to appreciate Impressionism in a rainy beech forest. My profile of Horada and her work appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Selections , following three pieces I wrote on Contemporary Istanbul for the previous issue of the Beirut-based luxury lifestyle magazine. Read my article, "Sibel Horada: What's lost and left behind": jp...

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...