Profile
 

PhD granting institution 
University of Cambridge 

Short biography 
Umut is an Assistant Professor of Transnational Mobilities and Migration. She specializes in transnational development programs and aid policies, expert networks and mobilities, forced military migration, and political and cultural mobilization with an ethnographic perspective from the Armenian/Kurdish region in Turkey. Her research is available in platforms such as Jadaliyya (2022), Current Anthropology (2021, 2023 fc), and Anthropological Theory (2019). Previously, she was affiliated with the Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at FU Berlin and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, ICI Berlin, and taught political anthropology at Bilgi, Bogaziçi, and Sabanci Universities in Istanbul, Turkey.
 

Selected publications
 

Edited Book Volume

• 2023 War-torn Ecologies, An-archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East. Foreword by Françoise Vergès. Cultural Inquiry Series, 27. ICI Berlin Press: Berlin.

Book Chapter

• 2023 War-torn Ecologies: Human and More-than-Human Intersections of Ethnography and the Arts. In War-torn Ecologies, An-archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East. Foreword by Françoise Vergès. Cultural Inquiry Series, 27. Pp. 1–26. ICI Berlin Press: Berlin.
• 2023 Mulberry Affects: Ecology, Memory, and Aesthetics on the Shores of the Tigris River in the Wake of Genocide. In War-torn Ecologies, An-archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East. Foreword by Françoise Vergès. Cultural Inquiry Series, 27. Pp. 27–66. ICI Berlin Press: Berlin.

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

• 2024 Resistant Breathing: Ruined and Decolonial Ecologies in a Middle Eastern Heritage Site. Current Anthropology. Forthcoming.
• 2021 Spaced out States: Decolonizing Trauma in a War-torn Middle Eastern City. Current Anthropology 62(6):717–740.
• 2019 Space, Loss and Resistance: A Haunted Pool-Map in South-Eastern Turkey. Anthropological Theory 19(4): 440–469.

Current research

A manuscript for her first monograph, Low Intensities: War, Extraction, and Resistance in a Middle Eastern Capital, is in the works.  Low Intensities provides an ethnographic inquiry into the complexities of war making and peace building through the windows of forced migration and extraction. The book centers on the almost four decades long low-intensity war between the Turkish state and the guerrilla army of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has resulted in at least 50,000 casualties and the displacement of a further 4 million people, making it one of the longest and most turbulent wars in the geographies associated today with the Global South and East. Her edited book volume on War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East was published by ICI Berlin Press in 2023. The volume identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East through the crevices of mass violence across species.