Tuna Ogut’s research deals with the social, political, and economic forces that shape urban life and space. He is a PhD candidate in Human Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, holding an LSE PhD Studentship. Tuna’s doctoral research investigates access to politics as an issue of urban social infrastructure through the ethnographic study of trans people’s political organising practices in Istanbul.

He organises conferences, workshops, and roundtable events in applied ethics, political studies, analytical philosophy, architecture, and the broader social sciences as a board member at Poedat, an interdisciplinary academic society. Tuna does peer-reviews for geography and urbanism journals. He also publicly collaborates with grassroots groups, socially-minded venues, and non-governmental organisations.

Tuna is a graduate teaching assistant for classes Urban Geography and Globalisation and Field Methods in Geography at the LSE. He has five years of experience in teaching urban studies courses and architectural design project studios prior to joining LSE. In these courses, undergraduate students learned to conduct extensive urban analysis, developed public building projects in complex urban settings, explored the urban forces that operate architecture, and critically evaluated the social, political, and economic dimensions of urban development.

His previous ethnographic research, based on three years of immersive fieldwork in Istanbul, draws from feminist, queer, and trans geographical perspectives, exploring how a trans and non-binary community of drag performers creates an urban place for expression and gender exploration, and was published in Gender, Place and Culture (Ogut et al., 2025). Tuna’s writing also appeared at Betonart, a magazine of architecture and design.