Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Umut Kuruüzüm is an LSE-trained economic anthropologist with expertise in war, disaster, and pollution economies, humanitarian logistics, and child labour. Since September 2024, he has been a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, focusing on the economies that emerged after the collapse of infrastructure in Türkiye following the 2023 earthquake, with Hatay as his fieldwork site in the north-eastern Mediterranean. His research investigates how communities navigate the loss of material property, the economies of debris recycling and disaster profiteering, and the use of containers as architectural responses in post-disaster environments.

Since completing his PhD at the London School of Economics in October 2018, he has been affiliated as an assistant professor of development at İstanbul Technical University and has served as a lead consultant on various projects with the World Bank, UNICEF, GIZ, the ILO, and the US Department of Labor, focusing on eliminating child labor and enhancing livelihood resilience.

In 2023-2024, he received a Wenner-Gren Post-PhD award for research examining the effects of plastic pollution on land, water, and seasonal agricultural workers in the Çukurova Delta. His first book, Building from Scrap: War, Recycling, and Labor in Iraqi Kurdistan was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022. He directed two short films: Çukurova’s New Harvest: Plastics, a documentary on the proliferation of agri-plastics and recycling economies in agricultural fields, funded by the British Council COP26 Grant, and Under the Cover of Night, an animated film that depicts children's night work in tobacco fields.