by Abigail Tulenko
On March 25th, Tufts University PhD student and Fulbright scholar Rümeysa Öztürk was forcibly detained and taken into ICE custody. Though the young woman posed no physical threat, she was surrounded and restrained by no less than six plain-clothed officers. Video footage shows that badges were not presented until after Rümeysa was restrained. No charges have been filed against her, and she was not afforded the right to due process. As they arrested her, the officers covered their faces with masks. In the Nation, Kaveh Akbar writes that “they looked suddenly…like they needed to hide from God their ghoulish glee at disappearing a…student who, it was later reported, was walking to break Ramadan fast with her friends.”
Like the masks, the words we use for this incident often function to obscure. Take the word “detained.” Rümeysa isn’t being detained in any sense of the word as we use it in non-legal contexts. It’s not as though the officers have held her up or made her late to her dinner. For over 24 hours, her family and friends were not able to contact her or informed of her whereabouts. Rümeysa’s belongings were taken from her, she was barred from communication, and disappeared to Louisiana- over a thousand miles from the city she lives in.
Take the word “custody,” which implies care, protection, guardianship. Gardeners are custodians of their plot, parents have custody over their children. To call the violence of the state “custody” is a profound perversion of the word’s historical meaning. The violence Rümeysa experienced and continues to experience is the opposite of care and protection.
Take the “detention center.” This too, glosses over the reality of her situation. “Detention” evokes a stale classroom after-school. In actuality, as a special report from the American Immigration Center argues, the US immigration detention center is in many ways virtually “indistinguishable from criminal incarceration” from the layouts of its facilities, to its systems of punishment and surveillance.
I begin with this analysis of words because Rümeysa herself holds language dear. Her academic work reveals a profound attention to the manner in which our concepts have real consequences in the world, shaping and demarking the realm of political and personal possibility. As we can see in the news coverage of Rümeysa’s abduction, the language we use to refer to state violence covertly shapes our imagination of its nature. Words like “custody” and “detention” obscure the reality of what Rümeysa experienced. But Rümeysa’s work shows us how words can also be liberatory- revealing not only what is, but what can one day be.
Like Rümeysa, I am a third year PhD student in the greater Boston area. Like Rümeysa, I spend my evenings after class or student meetings walking to meet friends in the winding streets of Somerville. Like her, I fasted for Ramadan, and looked forward to iftars where I could be in community with friends of many different religious and cultural backgrounds. Upon hearing the news of her abduction, PhD student that I am, I found myself irrepressibly drawn to read her work. My inquiry is part of who I am. If you want to really know me, you have to spend some time thinking with me. I suspect this may be another way that I am like Rümeysa. So, I wanted to think with her. In this essay, I warmly invite you to think with me as I think with her.
First, I read the op-ed that is being cited as the inciting incident for her arrest. News outlets often fail to mention that this piece was not written by Rümeysa alone, but had numerous coauthors and was endorsed by 32 other Tufts School of Engineering and Arts and Sciences Graduate Students. These outlets generally point to its support for calls for the University to divest from companies with ties to Israel, and its use of the word “genocide” with regard to the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. Some go as far to suggest that the op-ed is supportive of Hamas, though the word does not appear in the text. I’m sure that Rümeysa, as an experienced teaching assistant, has spent countless hours explaining to students the difficult skills of close reading and reconstructing an argument. It is often important to distinguish the inferences one might draw from a text from its explicit argument.
If you actually read the op-ed, you’ll find that it is astoundingly modest in its framing. The “radical” argument of the piece is that Tufts ought to honor the democratic process of its community union senate and uphold “its own declared commitments to free speech, assembly and democratic expression.” The op-ed itself never argues definitively in favor of the use of the term genocide. It merely asserts that there are “credible accusations against Israel” of “plausible genocide,” words taken from the ruling of the International Court of Justice. Further, the op-ed doesn’t explicitly endorse the content of the measures of the community union senate. It merely argues that the democratic process of the senate warrants meaningful engagement. It’s even charitable enough in its framing of the debate as to acknowledge the merits of a counter-argument from the university (“an argument may be made that the University should not take political stances and should focus on research and intellectual exchange”). Its central thesis is as follows: “We reject any attempt by the University or the Office of the President to summarily dismiss the role of the Senate.”
According to Marco Rubio, this statement in a student newspaper calling for a university to take seriously its own student senate presents “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.” So serious in fact, he suggests, that it merits the violent arrest and indefinite detainment of a promising young academic, who herself was one among over 30 students in support of the statement. Of course, Rümeysa’s arrest is horrifically unjust regardless of the claims of the op-ed. But if I were in her shoes, I would want to be shown at least the minimal respect to have my words read with attention.
In this op-ed, I’ll take this opportunity to be far less modest in my framing. I’ll state my stakes clearly here: I do believe that what is occurring in Gaza right now is a genocide. I am supportive of the movement for universities to disclose and divest from companies that materially benefit from this genocide. On my own campus, I am disgusted by Harvard’s blatant censorship and capitulation – of which the recent dismissal of the leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the suspension of Harvard Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative are just instances. But note: Rümeysa did not say these things. And she was still targeted.
It is disturbing that an argument so careful, so charitable to its adversaries, is being cited as justification for her violent arrest. I can see a few explanations, equally terrifying and not mutually exclusive. First, our nation’s tolerance for free speech is such a farce that even an argument of this modest nature is considered grounds for violent intervention. Secondly, the system is intentionally targeting those making modest claims in order to maximize on scare-tactics; if they’re going after someone for something like this, they send the message that even moderate displays of dissent will not be tolerated. Thirdly, the article is being misrepresented because Rümeysa’s doxxing and subsequent arrest was never really about the claims of the article in particular. Rather, citing the article is a cover for a targeted attack on people like her- people of a certain background/ethnicity and/or religion, people with particular political commitments, people who are part of a larger movement for justice in Palestine and beyond.
After reading the op-ed, I ventured into Rümeysa’s academic work. I was able to find two papers that she’s published in prestigious academic journals. Rümeysa’s work is incisive, passionate, and deeply human. It both precedes and will outlive this horrific moment, and there is much about this moment that we can learn from it.
In a 2023 article for the Journal of Children and Media, Rümeysa surveys representation of refugee characters and experiences in children’s animated television. She argues that “learning is social, and people learn by observing the characters directly or indirectly from media.” As such, imaginative interventions in the form of stories can both help refugee children “make sense of their experiences,” and help non-refugee children develop “ positive intergroup attitudes, conflict resolution, and prosocial attitudes.” Reading the paper, I am struck by Rümeysa’s belief in the power of imagination to shape concrete reality.
In a 2021 paper for the Nesne Journal of Psychology, Rümeysa offers the “first study conducted in Turkey that aspires to understand the underlying cognitive and emotional components of death.” In particular, the article focuses on how Turkish children conceptualize death, and how this relates to the manner in which parents communicate about death. Her hope is that the findings can provide clues to “enabl[ing] a healthy conceptualization of the notion” for children in the aftermath of loss. Her insights are informative both in terms of ways parents might communicate better with their children about deeply challenging realities that push at the limits of language, and the manner in which we might develop grief-informed educational and therapeutic interventions around child welfare.
The study assesses child conceptualization of death along a few dimensions, including irreversibility (the understanding that death is permanent), inevitability (the understanding that death must happen to all living beings), and causality (the understanding of how/why particular deaths occur). She told the children stories and asked questions framed around the deaths of imaginary “aunts/uncles/cats/ and flowers.” In the context of the study, these become the four pillars of a child’s world. Questions like: “can some Aunts live forever?” and “Do all cats have to die?” probe the children’s comprehension. As I read, I worry that I’m behind the children developmentally, because I can’t bring myself to answer some of the questions. Is it inevitable that a flower must die?
One of her findings was that older children, on average, were better able to comprehend the notion that death is inevitable. I wonder whether this is a positive development. When, and why, do we come to believe that some things are inevitable? I’ve often felt like the present moment calls for a resistance to the notion of the inevitable. But Rümeysa’s work is pointing me to a more nuanced notion: the present moment calls for a careful attention to what is and what is not inevitable. My head is resounding with the prayer of my Catholic upbringing- “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I want to ask Rümeysa what she thinks about the wisdom to know the difference. I suspect many people at the moment, myself included, place too many things in the category of the unchangeable. False serenity, the prayer tells us, is a failure of both courage and wisdom.
Rümeysa’s work suggests that to live psychologically healthy and integrated lives, we all must come to understand the inevitability of death. But like Rümeysa, I also know that this does not mean that all particular deaths are inevitable. We must fight the false serenity of believing that the type of violent death we are witnessing in Gaza, Sudan, and beyond is inevitable. We must fight the false serenity of believing that the disappearing, intimidation, and silencing of dissenting voices is inevitable.
The overarching themes of Rümeysa’s work are how children conceptualize difficult realities like death, scarcity, and violence. I want to know how we adults are supposed to conceptualize the broad-day kidnapping of a talented and passionate young woman. And I think the answer is: not alone.
I am so afraid. For myself and for my friends. And most of all, every day, all the time, for the people of Gaza- friends and strangers, and increasingly the queer mixture that has emerged of what feels like both. I am a white woman, a US citizen. I was born here and I am shielded by virtually every protective mechanism that a person could have. And still- I am so afraid. I started to write the sentence : “So I can’t imagine how those without these protections feel,” but I can, because they’ve told me, and no matter where we fall on the spectrum of vulnerability, I think we all must imagine because as Rümeysa’s work shows us, our concepts inform and shape our world in crucial ways.
As a philosopher, I’ve thought a bit about the thorny metaphysics of death. And like Rümeysa, I’ve actually reflected quite a bit about the dying of flowers. For me, the questions of interest pertain to ontology. Is there a precise moment a cut flower dies? Is a bouquet alive? It’s no longer connected to the organism as a whole, and yet, watered properly, the blossoms continue to bloom and grow. As I type, I’m staring at a floral arrangement some friends brought over when I hosted an iftar last night. A great variety of flowers teem with life, and looking at this gives me a sort of hope. You can snip off individual blooms and separate them from the rest, by scissors, by miles, and by walls. But like the arrangement on my table, the movement for justice in Palestine teems with irrepressible life so long as we have the courage and wisdom to water it.
When searching the internet for Rümeysa’s work, I was moved to discover a link to the meaning of her name in arabic. Stumbling across the web, I smiled to find that Rümeysa’s name means “bouquet.”
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You can read Rümeysa’s work at these links: Öztürk 2021, Öztürk 2023
You can donate to support her legal fund here: Justice for Rümeysa Öztürk | Chuffed | Non-profit charity and social enterprise fundraising
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Abigail Tulenko is an academic philosopher, as well as a fashion photographer. As a PhD student in philosophy at Harvard University, she studies philosophy of science and the metaphysics of experience. Her photographic work has spanned from covering NYFW runways to editorial projects for PhotoVogue, L’Officiel, Harper
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