Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist focusing on urban life, futurity, care, racialization, and migration. Her current book project, Figuring It Out: The Politics of Care, is an engaged ethnography of Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı neighborhood asserting care as a set of temporal practices that can reconfigure urban politics. Her second project, Transience and Blackness: West African Futures in Istanbul, critically investigates the notion of “transit migration” by centering on the futures that West African communities build in Istanbul. Alize’s work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, the Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements as well as public platforms such as beyond.istanbul, Platypus, Anthropology News, and the Jadaliyya podcast. Her writing received awards from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the American Ethnological Society. She is currently a host on the New Books Network podcast and the Middle East Section Editor for Anthropology News.

Alize’s work blurs the lines between research and activism. Her fieldwork centered on collaborating with community organizations to carve out new possibilities in the Tarlabaşı neighborhood of Istanbul, led by its residents. She brings this sensibility to her work as an educator. Across her roles at the American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section, Rutgers University’s Honors College, and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Arab American Cultural Center, she took on research and programming for student advocacy and mentoring.