Personal Profile

I am a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in economic, political and historical anthropology. My research examines the intersections of financialization, kinship and gender politics, and state power in Turkey, and demonstrates how cyclical and collective indebtedness reshapes social belonging, gender norms, and national attachments for working class populations in a globally financialized present.
My work critically engages with financial inclusion, extractive economies, and kinship and family studies by focusing on broader affective and relational frameworks underlying contemporary capitalism. Building on an overarching insight in the discipline, first delineated by Mauss, my work aims to bring a fresh perspective on the relational nexus of indebtedness. I approach borçluluk, “indebtedness,” as not only a financial state but also as a moral and relational condition, and I demonstrate how easy credit access reshapes gendered social belonging among working-class populations through the collective, and thus moralized, nature of maintaining a family (of dependents) and familial debts. I critically juxtapose national, moral, familial, and gendered attachments to indebtedness and examine various forms of debt-work.
My Ph.D. dissertation, “Rescaling Family and Intimacy via Indebtedness in the Soma Coal Basin” examined the concomitant intensification of two different forms of extractivism--financial value and coal--in Soma, a lignite-coal basin in the North-Aegean region of Turkey, inhabited by miner families burdened with debt. Given the steady nature of extraction in the Soma lignite basin, underground mineworkers earn “stable” wages, granting them access to easy consumer loans through mobile banking apps, with their regular salary serving as the sole required collateral in most cases. Becoming a miner and debtor has become the primary indicator of a man’s readiness to establish a nuclear family in Soma. Thus, borçluluk, “indebtedness” has been translated into a prerequisite for marriage and access to family love, further rendering debt ordinary and morally productive in this mining town. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with miners, bank employees, labor activists, and legal professionals, as well as over a decade of engagement with the region following the 2014 mining disaster, my research traces the trajectories of debt from financial institutions to mines and labor unions, extended kin networks, and nuclear households. In doing so, I explore how these financial instruments, despite being highly accessible, remain predatory and tightly regulated, particularly in cases of default, often leading to legal and familial crises.
My work also engages with historical and archival sources to examine the evolution of financial governance in Turkey. I explore the role of credit-oriented social policies in shaping national economic imaginaries, focusing on the development of financial and fiscal institutions from the late Ottoman period to the present. My research situates Turkey’s long history of financial dependency within contemporary state-led financial inclusion initiatives, and I explore how national credit mechanisms have been framed as instruments of economic sovereignty. While existing anthropological literature on financial inclusion often focuses on the provisioning of credit access to “disadvantageous” populations via the mediation of third-party actors, such as international or local NGOs, my project shifts the focus from “informality” and “benevolence” to emerging forms of nation state capitalism under financialization. Specifically, I examine the “wage-bank” model (maaş bankası in Turkish), a financing mechanism specific to Turkey that integrates workers into the domestic credit market by distributing wages through private banks while simultaneously facilitating access to consumer loans by rendering registered and stable incomes of workers as collaterals. My research thus demonstrates how state-mediated forms of “credit access” can forge nationalistic attachments to development through national belonging and simultaneously create a lucrative and “secure” market for the domestic credit industry.
By concomitantly examining the intergenerational aspiration of “taking control of life” that long accompanied dangerous coal mining in the Soma basin and the evolving of national credit access in my dissertation, I demonstrated the emergence of a new masculine imperative via indebtedness, “moral immunity,” which serves to measure one’s masculinity and morality within Soma’s miner community. This concept of moral immunity is an insight that I developed through my Ph.D. studies, and a conceptual framework that I plan to expand to different transnational frames in my postdoctoral studies, particularly in relation to a global environment of authoritarianism, protectionism and financial subordination.
My first book, tentatively titled The Labor of Indebtedness: Masculinized Credit Access and Aspiring for (Self)Development in the Soma Basin, will focus on how household indebtedness broadly works upon conceptions of “intimate ties” by prescribing new gender ideals and ethical and empathetic concerns as well as new mutual limitations regarding investments to social reciprocity. Each chapter of my book focuses on tracing the life cycle of debt in a particular site, ranging from banks and law offices to intimate settings such as miner homes and wedding ceremonies as well as within global registers of financialization such as financial rights, digitalization and interest rates.  It will expand on my analysis of the morally productive and “immunizing” functioning of monetary indebtedness by framing this particular local story within a global context of financial connectedness and (inter)dependency.