Within the scope of the History Program Hrant Dink Foundation, the third Social Science Graduate Students Workshop was held on 11 February 2019 at Hrant Dink Foundation, Anarad Hığutyun Building.

These workshops which particularly focus on the Armenian history and culture aim to support the dialogue between researchers by opening master’s and doctoral dissertations up for discussion. In the third of these workshops, two master's theses that discuss the theme of cultural heritage in the context of identity and space were discussed.

First, Yüzyıl Nevin Aydın’s thesis titled “Settling and dispossessing: Minorities in Sisli” completed at the Science and Technology Institute of Istanbul Technical University in 2017 was discussed. In her thesis, based on a survey she conducted with Greek Armenian and Jewish minority groups and on one-on-one interviews, she discussed the transformation of space into place through concepts such as belonging, internality, externality, and personalization. She talked about the relationship between the individual and social identities with the place, the dispossession and the loss of identity. After evaluating Aydın's thesis, Ahmet Ersoy talked about the significance of this thesis based on an interdisciplinary theoretical background and made suggestions about the new researches that could be done based on this thesis. He stressed the importance of tackling more specific and concrete contexts of how plural identities express themselves through space and place, and the need to address the practices of historicized connections and conversion of spaces into places.
The second thesis discussed was the dissertation titled “The protection proposal of Pera/Beyoglu region from the westernization process to present - the case of 480 and 476 building blocks” which was completed by Beste Seda Aydın in 2018 at the Istanbul Arel University Faculty of Architecture. In order to set an example for the holistic conservation of Beyoğlu / Pera region, Aydın presented its documentation techniques which were composed of urban architecture inventory vouchers. In her thesis, Beste Seda outlined the importance of registration and documentation of the preservation of the architectural heritage by explaining the rates of deterioration in existing texture integrity with tables and graphics that she prepared for her dissertation. Burak Asiliskender, who evaluated the thesis, mentioned the importance of emphasizing the relationship between protection and documentation in the thesis and then talked about the importance of thinking on the question of “why do we protect?”. He stated that, sociologically, it was necessary to integrate the story of structures into such a study in order to reveal the human-space interaction. In addition, he spoke of the technical data needed for such a study and how to access this data.