Alize Arıcan

Faculty Fellow

Alize Arıcan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The City College of New York. Her work centers on the future as a site of both contestation and political possibility as it intersects with urbanism, racialization, and migration in Turkey. 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 future-oriented 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, Environment and Planning D, City & Society, JOTSA, 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 also served as a host for the New Books Network podcast.

Participating Years

2025–2026

Mobility: Transit and Transformation

Crises of mobility have become a key integer of social struggle in the world system. Whether one considers the explosion of different forms of movement or the production of immobility, in carcerality, wagelessness, enclosure, or via the securitization of borders, mobility and its discontents are central to radical activism across local and transnational communities.