Dr Mujge Kucukkeles

Mujge Kucukkeles is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS University of London. 

Her research examines the politics of humanitarianism and international development, exploring its intersections with the state, nationalism and citizenship in politically liminal spaces in the Middle East, with a specific focus on Iraqi Kurdistan.

More recently, her work is shifting towards investigating non-Western forms of humanitarianism and solidarity activism in the Global South, particularly within Turkey.
She is currently working on the AHRC-funded Archives of Solidarity project, which documents how refugees and citizens create spaces of mutual care and support in Turkey and the UK amid increasingly restrictive border regimes. Through collaborative ethnographic and archival approaches, she explores how solidarity is enacted within and alongside humanitarian settings, and how displaced and citizen communities participate in making their own historical and political records. Her work contributes to emerging debates on archival activism in contexts of displacement.

Drawing on this research, her work increasingly engages questions of ethical practice, critique and creativity within humanitarian settings, as well as the everyday negotiations through which young refugees craft possibilities for liveability amid racism, indifference and inequality.

Humanitarianism and international development; politics of displacement, refuge, and border regimes; solidarity and mutual aid; citizenship, nationalism and state formation in the Middle East; precarity, conflict and youth livelihoods; archival activism.

https://aos.soas.ac.uk/