I am an interdisciplinary scholar with research and teaching experience that transcend the disciplinary boundaries between political science, sociology, geography and socio-legal studies, with a thematic focus on mobility, migration and citizenship, and a regional expertise on Turkey, MENA and Europe.
I hold BA in Political Science from Boğaziçi University, MA in Social and Public Policy from University of Leeds, MA in Political Science from Sabanci University. I completed my PhD in the Interdisciplinary Near and Middle Eastern Studies program and Graduate Certificate in Law and Society Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
My research revolves around two core research themes: (a) state-society relations with a focus on the interplay between borders, mobilities and citizenship; (b) multi-scale politics and policies of migration. I very much care about contributing to critical scholarship, policy and public debates on migration, asylum and citizenship, from mobility justice perspective.
In my PhD research, I examined the EU-ization of the Greek-Turkish borderland over the course of the last half a century, its transformation from a site of conflict to a site of cooperation especially on migration management. This ethnographic research contributes to migration and citizenship theories by incorporating the discursive distinction made between legality and licitness in the analysis of how cross-border mobilities are perceived on the ground by both state and nonstate actors. Inspired by critical scholars of anthropology and geography of border, and their attentiveness to the historicization and contextualization of cross-border interactions, my research shows that social acceptability, as shaped by the militarized bordering practices of the last century, seems even more decisive on the one hand, whether the local actors comply with or defy national policies, and, on the other hand, the ways in which they engage in cross-border mobility practices and interact with their counterparts across the borders, be they border police, lawyers, migrant activities, smugglers, tourists, students or businesspeople.
