2023/ 2024
Late Ottoman Politics of Family, Gender, and the Making of Familial Citizenship
My research aims to provide an account that explores the politics of family through a gendered perspective and with the purpose of shedding light on the question of the process of the making of citizenship in the late Ottoman context. Throughout the nineteenth century, the nature of the Ottoman state and tools of governmentality underwent major transformations giving way to a redefinition of state-subject relationships. In this process, the family was redesigned as the model of the modern state through legal, administrative, and medical technologies and discourses. However, what makes the Ottoman case interesting is the very crisis families faced in this period. At the very same time, the family was being idealized as one of the most important social institutions; political turmoil, economic disintegration, and environmental disasters triggered a massive family crisis. In this research, I will search the two-way processes where the legal, administrative, and medical policies refashioned the family and constructed an ideology of familial citizenship and where the actual family crisis shaped this ideology in return. Pulling the threads of these intertwined processes, this research will discuss late Ottoman politics of family and the making of the familial citizen.
2010/ 2011
Gender and the Politics of Female Body: Midwifery, Abortion, and Pregnancy in Ottoman Society (1838–1890s)
During her stay in Berlin she will be working on a book based on her dissertation about the gendered aspects of the population policies and politics of female body in the late Ottoman Empire. She will also conduct her research on a new project that examines the medical institutions for women in the Ottoman society.
