Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Ayşe Seda Yüksel-Pecen received her PhD from Central European University, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in 2014. Her areas of interests include economic and political anthropology; political geography, with a particular interest in rescaling of statehood, new regionalism and urban development in the neoliberal era; political theory with a focus on theories of state sovereignty, class and ethnic minorities in Turkey. Her PhD dissertation, “The Localization of Neoliberalism: State Rescaling, War and Culture in Southeast Turkey,” explores the processes of neoliberal restructuring in the southeastern region of Turkey through the lens of a fieldwork conducted in two cities in the region. Her work focuses on how different conceptualizations of the Turkish state, the low-intensity war, Kurdishness and Turkishness have been circulated in the narratives of business people and the urban markets. Between 2015-2017, Yüksel-Pecen worked as a post-doctoral field researcher for Vienna University and as a field research associate for the Center for the Study of International Relations of the Middle East and Central Africa (CIRMENA) at Cambridge University. Between 2013-2015, she conducted fieldwork in various cities in central Anatolia regarding local development strategies developed by local actors.

Yüksel-Pecen’s research has been supported by Foundation of Urban and Regional Studies (FURS), Migration Research Center at Koç University (MIREKOC), and The Scientific and Technological Research Council in Turkey (TUBITAK). She is the recipient of the ‘Best Dissertation Award’ in 2015 at Central European University. Before joining University of Vienna, Yüksel-Pecen was a research fellow at Kadir Has University where she worked on her own ethnographic research comparing various forms of urban entrepreneurial regimes in two regions in Turkey.

Selected Publications