Dr Ekin Kurtiç
- Assistant Professor, Development Studies
- University Teaching Officer
Contact
About
Ekin Kurtiç is an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the Centre of Development Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS).
Before starting at the University of Cambridge, Ekin was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern University. Previously, she was also a Junior Research Fellow at Brandeis University's Crown Center for Middle East Studies, and a Postdoctoral and Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California.
Ekin holds a PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.
Research
Ekin Kurtiç is an environmental and political anthropologist with interdisciplinary interests in environmental justice, infrastructure-led development, state and technopolitics, and rural futures. Her research centres on understanding how environmental ideas and practices are incorporated into the production of state, expert, and military power.
Guided by a broader interest in analysing the elite capture of environmental concerns, her research and teaching focus regionally on Turkey and the Middle East. She is currently writing her first book, Sediments of the Future: Building Dams, Restoring Nature in the Çoruh Basin. The book critically examines state-led nature restoration projects implemented alongside large dam construction. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Turkey, Sediments of the Future explores how the design and maintenance of future life in landscapes transformed by mega-infrastructure becomes a novel governmental concern, producing new ecologies and power asymmetries.
Most recently, Ekin has embarked on a historical ethnographic research project on militarized ecologies, focusing on the Turkish military’s past and present role in afforestation and tree planting. She is also developing a new multi-sited ethnographic project, tentatively titled Soil as Carbon Sink: Eco-fix in the Age of Climate Change. This research examines emerging forms of power and profit generated through the approach to soil as green infrastructure. Broadly, the project aims to identify and analyse the diverse set of the actors, interests, and contestations involved in the rise of nature-based solutions cast as an “ecological fix” to climate change.
Key publications:
- Kurtiç, Ekin 2025. "Salvage Work: The Making of Movable Nature for Post-Submergence Life." Political Geography, 121, p.103357.
- Kasdogan Duygu, Kurtiç, Ekin and Ekinci, Mehmet (eds.), forthcoming in 2025, Materializing Politics: Infrastructure, Science, and Expertise in Modern Turkey, I.B. Tauris Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Kurtiç, Ekin 2023. Infrastructural Decay: Maintenance Ecologies and Labor in the Çoruh Basin, Cultural Anthropology 38 (1): 142-170. https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/5072
- Kurtiç, Ekin and Nucho, Joanne Randa 2022. Infrastructural Politics: Pasts, Presents, Futures, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 40 (6): 967-974. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/02637758221144437
- Kurtiç, Ekin 2022. “Living with a Future Submergence: Dams, Temporality and Sacrifice in Northeastern Turkey,” POMEPS Collection on Environmental Politics in MENA. https://pomeps.org/living-with-a-future-submergence-dams-temporality-and-sacrifice-in-northeastern-turkey
- Kurtiç, Ekin 2022 “Criminalizing Environmental Activism in Turkey”. Middle East Brief #147, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University. https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/middle-east-briefs/pdfs/101-200/meb147.pdf
- Kurtiç, Ekin 2019. “Sediment in Reservoirs: A History of Dams and Forestry in Turkey,” in Transforming Socio-Natures in Turkey: Landscapes, State and Environmental Movements, Eds. Ethemcan Turhan and Onur Inal, Routledge, pp. 90-111.
- Kadirbeyoğlu, Zeynep and Kurtiç, Ekin 2013. “Problems and Prospects for Genuine Participation in Water Governance in Turkey,” in Contemporary Water Governance in the Global South: Scarcity, Marketization and Participation, eds. Leila M. Harris, Jacqueline A. Goldin and Christopher Sneddon, Routledge, 199-215.