Ilgin Erdem

Visiting Scholar

Ilgin Erdem is a sociologist and political economist whose work examines how marginalized communities create political alternatives under conditions of repression and inequality. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Economics at CUNY’s John Jay College, where she teaches corporate crime, urban economics, global capitalism, and the economics of justice. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and degrees in sociology and economics from Boğaziçi University. Her interdisciplinary research spans political economy, urban sociology, social movements, crime and illegality, and ethnographic methods, with previous work on political dissent, collective belonging, urban informality, and radical communities in Turkey. Her current research investigates the converging corporate and authoritarian transformations of public higher education in Turkey and the United States. Through a comparative study of Boğaziçi University and CUNY’s John Jay College, she examines how academic repression, corporate governance, surveillance, and the precarization of labor reshape university life.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.