Matriculated September 2023<\/p>\n
Political anthropology; resistance and activism; affect and emotions; gender and sexuality; migration and (im)mobilities; nationalism and citizenship; Turkey, Europe and the broader Middle East.<\/p>\n
Hazal Ayd\u0131n is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Boston University, currently conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul. She holds a BA in Sociology from Bo\u011fazi\u00e7i University and an MA in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Ko\u00e7 University. Before joining BU, she was a research assistant on the ERC-funded Takhayyul Project at UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity. She is co-creator of the \u201cImagining Turkey\u201d podcast series.<\/p>\n
Hazal’s research focuses on how and why people who have the means to detach from politics stay attached to it under repressive conditions for uncertain political gains. She is interested in the affective and everyday labor of sustaining visible left-wing resistance rather than withdrawing into private life, and in how different political actors in Istanbul, including activists, civil society workers, and human rights defenders, inhabit this attachment. Her work examines the structures of feeling that hold political communities together as conditions for collective action keep narrowing, with a primary focus on how privilege, exhaustion, and rootedness in place shape the everyday practices through which these actors keep showing up: in protests, in cultural spaces, in unionizing. She also asks how the boundaries of what counts as meaningful resistance are drawn and renegotiated within these communities. Although her research is based in Istanbul, it opens onto a broader and increasingly urgent question: the possibilities and limits of resistance as right-wing authoritarian governments take hold across much of the world, what makes it endure and what wears it down.<\/p>\n