I am an anthropologist, poet, and a postdoctoral fellow in disaster studies at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. I received my Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University. Here is some of what I wrote (the most recent ones pinned to the top).
|
Yazıyorum. Harvard Üniversitesi'nin Ortadoğu Çalışmaları Merkezi'nde, Felaket Çalışmaları alanında Doktora Sonrası Akademisyen olarak çalışıyorum. Sosyal Antropoloji doktoramı Columbia Üniversitesi'nde tamamladım. Yazdığım bazı şiirler, yazılar, makaleler ve iki şiir kitabımın linkleri aşağıda (yakın zamanda çıkanlar en üstte).
English
Türkçe
I work and write on labor, disability/debility and temporality in disaster and mining contexts—both in the ethnographic genre and in the genres of poetry and essay.
My dissertation, "Mining Interruption: Life, Labor and Coal After the Soma Mine Disaster", explores the afterlives of the Soma mine disaster of 2014, which took the lives of 301 coal miners in Western Anatolia. Through four figures (The Accidented [Kazalı], the Bride [Gelin], the Deserving [Hak Eden] and the Striker [Grevci]), it studies how the effects of disasters and injurious accidents are dissimulated in many facets of labor and everyday life within capitalism, and how they are experienced, bodily and subjectively, both as imminently present and as the holders of the future.
An ethnographic-documentary poetry collection (in Turkish) emerged from my 18-month-long fieldwork research: Sade Yaşadığımız [Our Sheer Living] (Nod, 2020). The first poem from this collection that I translated into English ("What did you understand?") has recently appeared in Tendon Magazine.
At Harvard CMES, I am currently working on an ethnographic and oral history project on the February 6 twin earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria, and claimed the lives of at least 53,537 people in Turkey alone. My first fieldwork visit to the city of Antakya/Antioch in Eastern Mediterranean Turkey took place during and after the first anniversary of the earthquakes.
Meanwhile, I have recently started developing a new project on deep sea mining and the material politics of future-making and uncertainty in this new frontier of extractive colonialism.
These three projects—on the Soma mine disaster, on the February 6, 2023 twin earthquakes, and on deep sea mining—are the intertwined backbones of my first academic book project, tentatively titled The Banality of the Near Future: Disaster, Accumulation, Interruption. I follow a seemingly unnatural/industrial disaster, a seemingly natural one, and a group of incalculable future disasters that scientists anticipate if the deep sea is mined as planned. The book has two aims. The first is to chart an anthropology of the near future as fully dependent on the need for energy, production and consumption, and as full of disasters (including the disasters that constitute the climate crisis) and social inequities. The second is to ask what forms of politics and organization can interrupt this banality and enable a different near future.
My political engagements are central to my research and teaching practices and I have been involved with the feminist, LGBTQIA+, and labor movements in Turkey for more than a decade.