Biography
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 a sociocultural anthropologist whose research intersects political anthropology, materiality and infrastructure studies, political ecology, and environmental history. Her work focuses on the role of infrastructure and ecology in the making of state power, techno-environmental expertise, and rural futures.
Ekin has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Çoruh Basin in northeastern Turkey to critically examine state-led projects of restoring and salvaging nature in the process of large dam building. Drawing on this research, she is currently writing a book manuscript entitled Sedimented Landscapes: Building Dams, Restoring Ecologies. Her book offers a new perspective in social studies of water and dams by putting human relationships with sediment at the center of analysis.
Ekin has recently embarked on a new research project on militarized ecologies, particularly focusing on the Turkish military's role in afforestation and tree planting practices. She is also developing a new multi-sited ethnographic research project, tentatively titled Soil as Carbon Sink: Eco-fix in the Age of Climate Change, which critically examines the practices of governing soil as a “green infrastructure, and an ecological fix to climate change.
Publications
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.
