Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist focusing on urban life, futurity, care, racialization, and migration. 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 temporal 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 is currently a host for the New Books Network podcast.

Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology (2021), University of Illinois at Chicago

B.A. in Political Science and International Studies (2014, summa cum laude), Boğaziçi University

2023. “Counterfactual Future-Thinking” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41(4): 637–655.

2021. “1237, or, Dying Elsewhere” Current Anthropology 62(1): 110–116.

2020. “Care in Tarlabaşı amidst Heightened Inequalities, Urban Transformation, and Coronavirus” Radical Housing Journal 2(2): 219–228.

2020. “Behind the Scaffolding in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul: Manipulations of Time, Delay, and Power” City & Society 32(3): 482–507.