My research takes up the future as a site of contestation and political possibility. More specifically, I am interested in how people reconfigure broader political projects that seek to disenfranchise them—from urban transformation and displacement, to transit migration and anti-Blackness.
My dissertation project, Figuring It Out, broadly explores how time shapes urban politics during processes of protracted urban renewal. Based on 16 months of archival research, oral histories, and engaged fieldwork in Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı neighborhood—the site of Turkey’s first urban transformation project, Taksim 360—I trace:
how delays and durations of urban renewal reshuffle power dynamics among builders and politicians, and
how Tarlabaşı residents employ and navigate those temporalities to stake claims in Tarlabaşı’s future.
This project asserts time and care as important political tools which residents—mostly migrants and minorities—employ when facing displacement. I argue that residents inhabit extended urban transformation through future-oriented everyday practices of care, which they and I call “figuring it out” (a translation of "halletmek" in Turkish). My work accounts for everyday forms of agency and future-making as novel arenas of urban politics, in the intersections of debates on urban transformation, temporality, migration, and care.
I am currently developing a second project, tentatively entitled Transience and Blackness. This project critically investigates the notion of “transit migration” through an ethnography of the social and material worlds that Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Sierra Leonean communities create in Istanbul. It seeks to reveal the entanglements between the nonrecognition of anti-Blackness in Turkey and the political implications of transience as a register through which Black migration is understood. Please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to hear more about this work.
All images on this website are photographs I took throughout my fieldwork between 2017 and 2018, capturing the extended presents of urban development and urban futures as political means.
I also participated in a Humanities Without Walls project (funded by the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation), Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene, as a Graduate Collaborator and Field Coordinator. I led the Istanbul field initiative in Tarlabaşı, which engaged in and traced creative solidarity practices in the face of urban development in Turkey through fieldwork. I collaborated with a team of anthropologists (Tarini Bedi and Caitlyn Dye) and artists (Tamara Becerra Valdez) to conduct this work through a collaborative and interdisciplinary lens. The project’s outputs included artwork by Tamara Becerra Valdez and research documentation that were displayed in the exhibition “All Have The Same Breath” (Gallery 400, Chicago) as well as an article I contributed to beyond.istanbul, a magazine published by the Center for Spatial Justice in Istanbul. Currently, I am serving as one of the editors for a collected volume based on this project.