I am a second-year graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I studied Communication, Media and Cultural Anthropology (BA, 2017) at the University of Bremen and Bahcesehir University in Istanbul. I also hold a prospective MA (2020) in Science and Technology Studies from Goethe University Frankfurt. My research has been funded by the German Fulbright Commission and the German Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung).
My current research focuses on community data infrastructures needed in response to the “Anthropocene” broadly conceived. Most recently, I have begun examining activist data collection and archiving in response to the Taiwanese company Formosa Plastics.
I further co-developed a series of collaborative research projects, including Quotidian Anthropocenes (sponsored by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), Visualizing Toxic Places (sponsored by UCI’s Center for Ethnography) and the Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 Project. I am also a member of the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) design team, where I publish a monthly research update.
Together with Kim Fortun and Kaitlyn Rabach, I teach the online undergraduate course Environmental Injustice, open for all University of California students. In the course, I particularly focus teaching the use and critical analysis of civic data resources.
I have produced visual work, including a short documentary film on free software hacker communities in Turkey and a science communication series titled “Tactics for Quotidian Anthropocenes. In 2017, my ethnographic study of free wireless mesh networks in German refugee camps received the DARIAH Award for emerging scholars in the digital humanities.
