Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar
Website
Areas of Expertise
Urban anthropology, political anthropology, urban transformation, care, futurity, temporality, displacement, migration, racialization, Blackness and anti-Blackness, Istanbul, Turkey, Middle East
About
My research takes up the future as a site of both contestation and possibility in urban politics. My first book project, Figuring It Out: The Politics of Care, is an engaged ethnography of Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı neighborhood asserting care as a set of temporal practices that can reconfigure urban politics. My second project, Transience and Blackness: West African Futures in Istanbul, critically investigates the notion of “transit migration” by centering on the futures that West African communities build in Istanbul. My writing received awards from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the American Ethnological Society. She is currently a host on the New Books Network podcast and the Middle East Section Editor for Anthropology News.
Selected Publications
- Arıcan, Alize. 2022. “Rumor as Archive: The Story of the Golden Cross in Taksim 360” Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 8(1):109–128.
- Arıcan, Alize. “1237, or, Dying Elsewhere” Current Anthropology 62(1): 110–116.
- Arıcan, Alize. “Care in Tarlabaşı amidst Heightened Inequalities, Urban Transformation, and Coronavirus” Radical Housing Journal 2(2): 219–228.
- Arıcan, Alize. “Behind the Scaffolding in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul: Manipulations of Time, Delay, and Power” City & Society 32(3): 482–507.
- Arıcan, Alize. 2019. “The Ghost of Karl Marx” entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography 2(2): 27–32.
Courses
- CAS AN 594 Special Topics: Race and Racialization in the Global South