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Ekin Kurtic

Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow

Ekin Kurtiç (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2019) is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is at the intersection of environmental humanities, social studies of infrastructure and technopolitics, and political ecology. She is the 2022-2024 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. While at Northwestern, Kurtiç is working on her first book manuscript, Sedimented Landscapes: Building Dams, Restoring Ecologies in the Çoruh Basin, which critically examines state-led projects of restoring and salvaging nature in the process of large dam building in Turkey. Sedimented Landscapes shows that dam building is a central site of governing the socio-material space and enacting state power not only through environmental conquest but also through conservation. By tracing the role of the sediment carried by river waters in dammed landscapes, her book analyzes the making of state, techno-environmental expertise, and human and nonhuman lives through the governance of infrastructure and ecology. Kurtiç is also developing a new book project on the techno-ecopolitics of reframing soil as a "carbon sink" against the backdrop of the climate crisis and its implications for human and non-human lives in agricultural and pastoral landscapes of Turkey. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.