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About
I am an anthropologist and a medical doctor by training, working at the intersection of medical and economic anthropology. Currently, I am an LSE Fellow in Anthropology and a postdoctoral affiliate at the University of Oxford. My research examines how people navigate uncertainty, temporality, risk, and speculation, particularly in contexts of economic crisis and precarious life-making. I obtained my DPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, where I conducted long-term ethnographic research in Turkey on gambling, cryptocurrency trading, and state-regulated games of chance. My work traced the intersections of risk-taking, gambling and gambling addiction, and speculative economies such as cryptocurrency trading, situating them within shifting moral economies, class dynamics, and Turkey’s recent economic turbulence. Prior to this, I completed my MA in Anthropology at the American University in Cairo, where I investigated biomedical uncertainty through the governance of HIV-positive subjectivities and the biopolitics of global health in Egypt.
My teaching bridges economic and medical anthropology with visual, material, and digital cultures. At Oxford University, I taught across the Social Sciences Division and at Mansfield and Hertford Colleges, developing courses on economic anthropology, addiction, medical humanities, feminist and Marxist geographies, and critical development geographies. I have also taught ethnographic writing, digital and hybrid ethnography, and qualitative research methods. As an Ashmolean Teaching Fellow (2022–23), I collaborated with the Krasis programme to integrate museum objects into anthropological pedagogy, designing object-based teaching around health, value, and economic life. My teaching practice draws on diverse real-world ethnographies and case studies that I conducted in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and the UK, encouraging students to critically link anthropology with pressing global challenges. Supported by LSE funding, my current research explores the role of artificial intelligence in healthcare and medical education. This project investigates how technological affordances, ranging from algorithmic diagnostics to AI-driven training, reshape notions of expertise, care, trust, and professional practice. Building on my broader work on uncertainty and speculation, I examine how medical knowledge and futures of care are being reconfigured and reorganised through new digital infrastructures. This research not only contributes to debates in medical and economic anthropology but also engages with wider questions about technological governance, ethics, and the future of healthcare systems.
Before returning to academia, I worked for more than a decade as a public health specialist with the United Nations, Johns Hopkins University, and international NGOs. My work focused on the intersections of HIV/AIDS, gender-based violence, harm reduction, health economics, and reproductive rights. Alongside my academic research in Turkey and Egypt, I have also conducted ethnographic studies on womanhood and cleaning rituals in Iran, online gambling and betting in London, autonomous automobiles in Turkey with the Horizon 2020 framework, and smart home technologies in Cairo. These diverse qualitative research projects reflect my commitment to studying health, economy, and technology as entangled social processes, and to bringing these insights into teaching, writing, and public debate. My publications, outlined below, include peer-reviewed articles on gambling, speculation, and cryptocurrency in Turkey, as well as work on biomedical uncertainty, infectious diseases, and the moral economies of risk. I am currently developing a book manuscript based on my doctoral research on gambling and speculative life in urban Turkey.
Expertise
Economic anthropology; Medical anthropology; Gambling; Anthropology of time; AI and healthcare, HIV and AIDs; Violence and the state; Womanhood; Biopolitics of global healthcare and economics; Material culture; Turkey; Egypt