“The Istanbul I moved here for is gone” Today I gave a guest lecture in the course, Postcolonial Europe at Utrecht University, led by Dr. Gianmaria Colpani and Dr. Layal Ftouni. It was a great […]

“The Istanbul I moved here for is gone” Today I gave a guest lecture in the course, Postcolonial Europe at Utrecht University, led by Dr. Gianmaria Colpani and Dr. Layal Ftouni. It was a great […]
Artist, Burak Akbay, created and shared this piece online, saying on Twitter that he had made it as a new logo for Istanbul, since the city has a new symbol: the Arab hair transplant tourist.
I’ve been thinking about animal rights activism in Istanbul as a form of alternative solidarity being built under polarized political circumstances, and wondering how social media might play into this.
I’m very glad to be joining the sessions of a great event at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. Coinciding with my first days of fieldwork here in the city, the workshop has brought together a […]
This week our team’s paper was presented at IMISCOE’s annual conference, on a panel about methodological considerations in digital migration studies.
I was asked to write a commentary for the latest issue of Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures. The journal is open access, and this issue is dedicated to the theme of international migration and the […]
Yesterday I dropped by an inspiring symposium on Public Lives/Private Platform: The Politics of Twitter organized by Matt Cornell and co. at the University of Amsterdam. Was a great, self-organized space for activists, academics, journalists, and critical tech enthusiasts of many sorts. The keynote lecture by Jillian York on the history of the hashtag was very cool and it was a pleasure to meet her.
The sheer expanse of Istanbul means that my respondents only really live in a few neighbourhoods of it.
To understand the historical, political, and emotional resonance of this migration, we must first analyse such categories as gurbet and gurbetci. The gurbetci – one who lives in exile, diaspora, or away from the homeland – lives in a state […]
The first people I spoke with in Istanbul mentioned the protests outside the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam. This demonstration had followed the Dutch authorities’ decision to disallow Turkish ministers entry into the Netherlands to campaign for the […]