Born and raised in Istanbul, I am a social scientist with a PhD in Sociology, training in social psychology, and experience spanning university teaching, humanitarian practice, and community-based work. My research sits at the intersection of migration, urban life, citizenship, belonging, and intergroup relations. I completed my PhD in Sociology at Michigan State University in 2025, following an MS in Social Psychology at Middle East Technical University and a BA in Psychology at Koç University.

My doctoral research examined the everyday urban citizenship of middle-class Syrian refugees in Istanbul, asking how people navigate visibility, belonging, deservingness, and the right to the city under conditions of uncertain legal status and limited state-led integration. The project drew on 30 in-depth interviews, more than 90 hours of participant observation, and longitudinal engagement with cultural and urban spaces in Istanbul.

I continue to build on this research rather than treating the dissertation as a completed project. My ongoing work develops new questions and analyses from the original fieldwork while also incorporating follow-up research conducted after the dissertation. These projects examine, among other themes, opaque and selective naturalization, refugees’ interpretations of deservingness and membership, electoral politics, and alternative forms of political participation. I am also developing the dissertation into a broader book project on urban citizenship and everyday belonging among Syrians in Istanbul.

Before and alongside academia, I worked for approximately six years in refugee protection and humanitarian programming with UNHCR and the Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants (ASAM), including managing a large multi-service community centre in Istanbul. This practice-based background continues to shape how I approach research: with attention to institutional power, the politics of expertise, community knowledge, and the need for research relationships that move beyond extractive models. It also informs my growing interest in refugee-led and community-informed approaches to research and knowledge production.

I currently teach psychology and sociology courses at university level in Türkiye while continuing research and writing on forced migration, citizenship, urban belonging, humanitarianism, and political participation. My work is multi-method, combining ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, in-depth interviewing, survey research, and quantitative analysis. Across these projects, I am particularly interested in how people interpret institutions, negotiate belonging, construct ideas of deservingness and membership, and develop everyday forms of participation under conditions of uncertainty.

My academic work is also shaped by my interdisciplinary training across sociology and social psychology. This allows me to move between structural and institutional questions and more micro-level questions about identity, intergroup relations, attitudes, interpretation, and everyday social interaction.

Outside my primary research, I remain fascinated by street animals and interspecies relations, and I can often be found rowing, or looking for an erg, near sunrise.

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