I am an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. My research and teaching lie at the intersection of political and legal anthropology, political economy, border studies, science and technology studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, with a particular focus on modern Turkish and Kurdish politics.
MY RESEARCH
My work engages themes of law and legal activism, technopolitics, borders and transnational flows, contraband economies, sovereignty, counterinsurgency and authoritarianism, diaspora and cyberspace activism, and more-than-human legalities. A broader concern with emergent forms of politics and political agency interconnects these threads. In particular, I study forms of agency that exceed institutional domains such as electoral politics, civil society advocacy, and human rights activism. I examine how the materiality of objects, technoscientific expertise, and cross-border movements of humans and non-humans generate new modes of contentious politics. I ask how infrastructures of surveillance, control, and prosecution can paradoxically enable disenfranchised groups to contest state sovereignty or imagine alternative political communities. I also explore how humans collaborate with non-human actors to envision and enact alternate means of livelihood and justice.
Bringing together a focus on materiality, more-than-human relationalities, the dynamics of national and global capitalism, and local regimes of political and moral values, my research broadens anthropological understandings of law, sovereignty, borders, and regimes of surveillance and containment, as well as contentious politics, political refusal, and grassroots livelihood and justice practices that exist outside nation-state modalities.
My book, Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands (Stanford University Press, 2025), examines how Kurdish smugglers, with the support of their lawyers, legally disrupt state sovereignty in criminal courts. Moving from border villages, mountain passes, and road checkpoints to courtrooms, law offices, and forensic laboratories, the book explores how Kurdish smugglers and lawyers adopt and rework legal procedures, rules, and reasoning in ways that interrupt the courts’ capacity to co-opt, discipline, and oppress.
I am currently working on two new research projects. The first examines the criminalization of social media use and the deployment of digital evidence in criminal courts, analyzing how digital platforms paradoxically expand both dissident politics and authoritarianism. The second explores how Kurdish communities and human rights lawyers turn to domestic courts to prevent, delay, mitigate, or seek compensation for the environmental destruction inflicted by the state’s counterinsurgency war in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority provinces. Together, these projects constitute a broader research agenda on more-than-human legalities.