Hazal Aydin

Matriculated September 2023

Research Interests

gender, sexuality, queer studies, affect and emotions, media studies, creative and culture industries, theatre and performance studies, political imagination, nationalism, and political Islam.

About

Hazal Aydın is a PhD student at BU Anthropology. She started her PhD at Koç University’s Design, Technology, and Society program, but decided to pursue her academic studies at BU Anthropology. She got her BA from Boğaziçi University Sociology Department and her MA from Koç University’s Comparative Studies in History and Society program. Her research interests focus on gender, sexuality, queer studies, affect and emotions, media studies, creative and culture industries, theatre and performance studies, political imagination, nationalism, and political Islam. She was a research assistant at the ERC-funded Takhayyul project at UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity. She is also the co-creator of “Takhayyul Nativeness and Emergent Issues” and “Imagining Turkey” podcast series. In her MA studies, she conducted an ethnography with creative industry professionals. She researched the construction of gendered subjectivities in the field of theatre with a particular focus on gendered structures of media and culture industries and the political and economic forms of precarity in contemporary Turkey’s authoritarian and populist regime. She also conducted a small ethnography with Uzbeki migrant care workers in Istanbul focusing on the relationship between affective labor, care work, and migrant precarities. She is currently working on the interaction of the sexual and political in gendered subjectivities. She focuses on how gendered subjectivities are transformed at the affective level in contemporary Turkey through the JDP regime’s anti-gender rhetoric, moralism, and gendered populism. 

Awards & Grants

• Short-term Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship (GRAF). (2024).
• Middle East Section Best Graduate Paper Prize, The American Anthropological Association. (2023).

Publications

•  Aydin, Hazal. November 2024. ‘The Transformative Potential of Intimacy: Turkish Coffee Talk and Ethnographic Listening’. Allegra Lab. https://allegralaboratory.net/the-transformative-potential-of-intimacy-turkish-coffee-talk-and-ethnographic-listening/
• Aydin H. Diriliş: Resurrection theme in the populist regime of ‘New Turkey’ [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations]. Open Res Europe 2024, 4:55 (https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.16751.1)