Dr Ekin Kurtiç

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.