I am a PhD student in the Department of Political Science. My research interests include critical security studies and counterinsurgency, urban politics, race and ethnicity, and critical methodologies. I use ethnographic methods to explore spatialities of everyday warfare against racialized and ethnicized populations with a regional focus on the Middle East and Kurdish politics. Previously, I received my BA and MA degrees in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogazici University, Turkey. In addition, I was a Visiting Researcher as a part of the International Fox Fellowship at Yale University for 2018-2019.  

My research has been supported by a Summer Centennial Center Research Grant by American Political Science Association and a Travel, Research, Engagement Grant by Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS). At Johns Hopkins, my work has been funded by the Nicole Suveges Fieldwork Fellowship and the Provost’s Office COVID Relief Travel/Research Fellowship. In 2021, I was also awarded the Stanley and Linda Hambleton Panitz Endowed Fellowship by the Department of Political Science.

My research examines warfare and policing from the perspective of the urban and the everyday. With a specific focus on the civil war between the Turkish state and Kurdish guerillas in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır, I highlight how seemingly “productive” processes such as urban (de-)development and heritage tourism are constitutive of violent warfare, particularly racialized and ethnicized forms of war that seek to suppress the perceived threat of insurgency. In my dissertation, I examine these processes through an ethnographic approach. During 2022 and 2023, I conducted an 11-month, multi-sited ethnography of local governance and city planning in various districts of Diyarbakır. I explore the discourses, developmentalist processes, and political-legal dynamics underlying counterinsurgency efforts. These dynamics are deeply political, but less visible than the violent encounters between armed actors. Dominant methodological approaches within the study of political violence are overwhelmingly focused on the overtness of spectacular conflict. They are unable to perceive the everyday forms of violence that is part and parcel of counterinsurgency efforts. I take ethnography’s attentiveness to the ordinary to bring non-spectacular violence to the analytical surface.

My pedagogy is informed largely by decolonial feminisms. I recognize embodied forms of knowledge and personal experiences as an essential element of learning. In my classrooms, I strive to cultivate an environment in which diverse students are able to articulate connections between large structures of oppression and their everyday, lived experiences. Having gained extensive experience as a teaching assistant for courses in States, Regimes, and Contentious Politics, Introduction to Comparative Politics, and China and the World, I designed and developed a class called Politics of Love and Care listed in Intersession 2024. I am dedicated to creating classrooms in which diverse group of students are not only encouraged, but also equipped to, pursue their passions through care-full engagements with the communities in which they are embedded. Through my teaching I strive to enable students to realize their visions of a just world.

“Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Contentious Politics: A Case of Urban Warfare in the Kurdish Region of Turkey.” Kurdish Studies. 8 (2): 245–70.
2019 Best Doctoral Paper Award, Association for the Study of Nationalities