Meet Society of Fellows Anthropology Scholar Alize Arıcan
Dr. Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist focusing on urban life, futurity, care, racialization, and migration. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2021. Her current 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. Her 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. Alize’s work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, the Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements as well as public platforms such as beyond.istanbul, Platypus, Anthropology News, and the Jadaliyya podcast. Her 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. Learn more about Dr. Arıcan’s background and current work in an exclusive interview with CISS communications intern Lily Belisle.
What made you decide to be a social scientist/ why does social science matter to you?
What motivates my career is the goal of collectively working to solve social problems (however incomplete the solutions might be), rather than taking them as objects of study. Thinking and acting with communities, utilizing the knowledge they already produce, and working in unity is what I value most. And this is precisely why social science matters to me. The social sciences allow me to join the communities I cherish in working towards transformative justice in issues that matter to us—in my case, this would be urban transformation and racial justice in Turkey. Overall, the social sciences matter to me because of their transformative and collaborative potential. This is the reason why I exist as an interdisciplinary-minded anthropologist.
Can you tell us about a current research project that you’re excited about?
Currently, I am working on my first book, Figuring It Out: The Politics of Future in Istanbul. The book asserts care as an important political tool urban communities employ when facing displacement. In 2006, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government legalized the expropriation of property in neighborhoods chosen for sites of urban transformation projects, like Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı, often targeting migrants and minorities. Since then, many Tarlabaşı residents—mostly Kurds, Roma, West African and Central Asian migrants, Syrian refugees, and trans women—have been evicted to make room for an upscale residential and business complex, which is still under construction. For the rest, the possibility of displacement looms large. Drawing on 16 months of engaged fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research, I found that within this uncertain present, residents implement a set of everyday care practices to assert themselves as part of Tarlabaşı’s future. Residents and I call these practices “figuring it out”: using the delayed durations of urban transformation, they cultivate relationships with politicians and builders to curtail the project’s expansion, devise creative ways to retain their property and access government services, and maintain community by hosting public events. Care, I argue, is a future- oriented political engagement central to urban life, with the potential to keep displacement at bay. ‘Figuring It Out’ thus calls for attentiveness to potential urban politics, showing that people defy subjugation through time not yet lived, in the making.
I’m excited to use my time as a Postdoctoral Scholar within the BU Society of Fellows to complete this manuscript. I will also be using this time to expand my second project, which grew out of my work with West African migrants in Istanbul throughout my dissertation research. That project, tentatively entitled Transience and Blackness, will critically investigate the notion of “transit migration” as a political discourse that enables anti- Blackness in Turkey. I will also showcase the Black futures and worlds West African migrants build in Istanbul, re-articulating what Blackness means in the city. I am looking forward to being in conversation with faculty, students, and others in BU as I develop this work further.
What has led you to the intersection of disciplines within which your expertise lies? How does your research benefit from an interdisciplinary approach?
My work is primarily driven by what is on the ground. I start my work by asking a series of questions of the people with which I collaborate. “What can I do for you, with you? What are questions you think are important? What stories would you like me to tell? What work would you like me to do?” Asking these questions led me to the themes of temporality and care, which require multiple lenses to understand, as do many complex social problems. So, first, my work is interdisciplinary in a thematic sense. I draw on fields such as feminist studies, literary studies, geography, sociology, and others, which have long been preoccupied with these themes. My work presents the city as a lens to delve into these concepts, in conversation with urgent interdisciplinary debates about the Anthropocene and the future, care work and COVID-19, for example.
Second, methodologically, I locate my work primarily as an engaged ethnographer. As I alluded to a bit earlier, my approach to ethnography is not informed by working on people to generate data, but by working with people toward the worlds we envision collectively. So, I see working with communities as an orientation that bridges social sciences and activism—an orientation that draws from a long lineage of activist researchers. Further, I have collaborated with a wonderful artist, Tamara Becerra Valdez, as part of an interdisciplinary Humanities Without Walls project. Our collaboration showed me the importance of the tactile and the visual in how people envision futures in a continually changing city. So, artistic collaborations, mapping, among other forms of engagement are part of my methodological toolbox.
And this brings me to genre, the third way in which I locate my work as interdisciplinary. I envision my book as a literary ethnography, one that flirts with novel as a genre. I see storytelling as an essential part of foregrounding urban lives and making my work accessible across disciplines, so my book will be driven by stories. I am excited to be in conversation with humanists and literary thinkers across BU as I work on my manuscript.
More specifically, how do you see anthropology and archaeology overlap?
There is significant overlap between anthropology and archaeology. Archaeology seeks to understand the past human behavior through material remains that have been left behind. Anthropology seeks to understand cultural variation, past and present. I consider myself an anthropological archaeologist that is interested in the analysis of past remains to address anthropological questions that concern how societies, past and present, confront social and environmental change through ritualized behavior and daily practice.
What do you hope to accomplish during your time at BU?
My main goal is to complete the manuscript of Figuring It Out. I also aim to apply for grants to fund my long-term field research for my second project. But besides these career-oriented goals, I hope to engage with the stimulating intellectual environment of BU, build community, and think with both students and broader communities in Boston. I am looking forward to what is to come, and invite readers to reach out!
Learn more about the CAS Society of Fellows program here!