Sinan Dogan

My research interests include anthropology of mental health and care, anticolonialism, affect, environmental and ecological justice, disability and debility. My current research is about disabling environments in the context of environmental justice in Mon Valley – Pittsburgh. I am particularly interested in ways in which how neocolonial environments are created and sustained to debilitate subaltern bodies, and affective/emotional lifeworlds.

My first ethnographic research project examined informal political and cultural organization of Kurdish diaspora in the UK, through conflicting cultural models of solidarity and resistance (2015-2016). I also conducted preliminary ethnographic research with precarious office workers and entrepreneurs in Turkey regarding technologies of self-making (2017); and archival research on socio-cognitive development and culture change with the pervasiveness of digital technologies (2018). Meanwhile, I worked as research assistant for the ERC-funded interdisciplinary project “The New Politics of Welfare: Towards an ‘Emerging Markets’ Welfare State Regime” (2017-2018).

I have taken part in several nongovernmental organizations and grassroots advocacy groups focusing on alternative economies, anti-imperialism, ecology, and animal rights. I am currently a member of a worker-owned agricultural cooperative dealing with the farmers` cooperativization, community-engaged education and lifelong development projects in Turkey; and of a cooperative housing project in Pittsburgh.

Publications

Dogan, S. (2020). “Thinking Against the Blackmail of Democracy” [Review of the book Red Hangover by Kristen Ghodsee] Anthropology Book Forum.

Dogan, S. (2019). Politically Framed Cultural Models and Construction of Autonomous-Related Self. In H. S. Majhail & S. Dogan (Eds.), World of Diasporas: Different Perceptions on the Concept of Diaspora (pp. 46-57). Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004388048_006

Degrees and Education

BA - Psychology - Koç University, Turkey (2018)