Professor Jordi Tejel, (Institut d'Histoire, Universite de Neuchatel) presents the talk "States of Rumours: Information Orders in the Turkish-Syrian Borderland, 1929-1945"

This talk will recall that the study of rumours offers a means to examine popular politics, mentalities and behaviours, allowing historians to take into account those without a voice into the historical narrative. Yet, rumours can also be spread by elites, and more importantly, rumours arisen from the subaltern and the elites might shape and reshape each other. In that regard, the talk will show how borderlanders along the Turkish-Syrian frontier as well as state and border authorities produced rumours that reflected the fears, hopes and mentalities of the interwar period – an era of extreme fluidity and uncertainty–, making borderlands a privileged site to observe the politics of governance, the construction of national identities, notions of state stability and, last but not least, individual agency.