Biography:
İmren DOĞAN was born in Beypazarı in 1968. She had her bachelor’s degree from Ankara University Faculty of Health Education, and completed postgraduate training at Gazi University Institute of Science and Technology.
Starting in 2003 at the Ankara Photographers Association, her photography training continued with various workshops. She took lessons from Jodi Bieber about documentary project planning and she participated in more than forty exhibitions. She took part in documentary projects such as “Lal”, which is about metal workers; “People of Which Earth”, which is about seasonal agricultural workers, “Freedom for Sale”, which tells the sad story of bird auctions; and “Three Brothers in Anatolia” which covers the subject of the three monotheistic religions in Antakya area.
She also participated in projects such as “Documenting the Ecological Structure of the Salt Lake”, “The Effects of Climates on Nature and Ecology”, “Darwin/Evolution”, “Documenting the Urban Transformation of Ulus Altındağ”, and “Problems and Suggested Solutions of Seasonal Agricultural Worker” – a corporate project carried out by the Turkey Photographic Arts Federation. As a board member of the 6th Period Turkey Photographic Arts Federation and as a member of Ankara Association of Nature Photographers, she carries out many documentaries and projects.
Currently, İmren DOĞAN works as a training specialist in a public institution.
Exhibition: The Unseen… and the Unheard…
The concept of seasonal agricultural worker (SAW) is used to describe those migrating from one place to another for seasonal agricultural production and returning home at the end of the reaping season. In the world and in our country as well, women and children constitute a large portion of the seasonal workforce and women’s weight in this distribution continues to rise day by day. Workers’ families are often poor families living in rural areas that lack educational opportunities and vocational training. Their poverty is one of the most striking examples of the recent poverty, and as such they are reported as “The unseen and the unheard” by the governmental and non-governmental organizations, scientists and research institutions alike.
According to the 2013 statistics of Turkey Statistical Institute (TSI), of the total 26 million people employed in the workforce, 25% are employed in the agriculture sector. It is estimated that seasonal workforce constitute approximately 40% of the agricultural labor force of 6.5 million. When we take a look at the migration map of the country, the limited working area in Southeastern Anatolia, the inequality of land distribution in the rural area along with the poverty of the urban population restrict employment opportunities and makes the seasonal agricultural employment the only possible option for the local population. This is a group where premature deaths and diseases are high due to bad living and housing conditions, inadequate and one-sided nutrition, lack of regular access to drinkable and potable clean water, the inability to dispose of waste water and sewage, increasing environment pollution due to improper living conditions, accidents that occur during transportation, reproductive health problems, the effects of pesticides, extreme heat and cold, poisoning and injuries. While more and more of these families need access to comprehensive health care, the fact that they live in the fields outside of urban areas, frequent displacements, their lack of awareness to protect their own health, low health insurance opportunities, illiteracy seen particularly among women, and communication problems due to language differences makes it impossible for them to have continuous access to health care. One of the most fundamental problems is the need for child labor because of the fact that these children have nobody that looks after them, and that they have to migrate with their families as a result. Working children are often cut off from formal education opportunities and lose the chance of acquiring vocational education and are deprived from social mobility. Unfortunately, children share the same future as their parents who cannot get out of the vicious cycle of poverty.
The resulting environmental pollution and the social exclusion because of ethnic reasons are other dimensions of the same problem.
This 3-year long work aims to determine the systemic problems of the seasonal agricultural workers in our country, to help create the visual archive of the problem, to give momentum to the efforts of the relevant institutions and organizations and to help support the obtained results by sociological data.
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