About Me
I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. My work examines everyday political behavior under conditions of extreme inequality.
To study this topic, I draw on different instances of immigration politics. For example, I have studied how the U.S.-Mexico border – where migrants cross—has become a popular site for ordinary Americans to engage in emotionally draining, physically arduous, and often ineffective forms of collective action. I have also interviewed Canadians about why they sponsor refugees who they do not know personally but for whom they volunteer significant amounts of time, money, and resources. I have also studied why second-generation children support anti-immigrant parties and politicians.
In all these case studies, my work focuses on dominant groups (citizens) and how they make sense of others less privileged than themselves (non-citizens). Sometimes, I also investigate why these dominant groups mobilize in the ways they do and the material and ideological consequences of these collective endeavors.
These topics interest me because of my own lived experiences with migration, power, and politics.
Like other middle-class Turkish men who came of age in the late 1970s, my father sought economic opportunities abroad. These ambitions were shaped by the legacy of post-World War II guestworker programs – like the German Gastarbeiter—which recruited labor from Turkey and other Mediterranean countries to help rebuild economies devastated by war.
To study this topic, I draw on different instances of immigration politics. For example, I have studied how the U.S.-Mexico border – where migrants cross—has become a popular site for ordinary Americans to engage in emotionally draining, physically arduous, and often ineffective forms of collective action. I have also interviewed Canadians about why they sponsor refugees who they do not know personally but for whom they volunteer significant amounts of time, money, and resources. I have also studied why second-generation children support anti-immigrant parties and politicians.
In all these case studies, my work focuses on dominant groups (citizens) and how they make sense of others less privileged than themselves (non-citizens). Sometimes, I also investigate why these dominant groups mobilize in the ways they do and the material and ideological consequences of these collective endeavors.
These topics interest me because of my own lived experiences with migration, power, and politics.
Like other middle-class Turkish men who came of age in the late 1970s, my father sought economic opportunities abroad. These ambitions were shaped by the legacy of post-World War II guestworker programs – like the German Gastarbeiter—which recruited labor from Turkey and other Mediterranean countries to help rebuild economies devastated by war.
"International Special Report, Iraq", 1998, The Washington Post Company
My father’s father, a talented glassblower, had nearly gone to Germany to work for a company that manufactured laboratory equipment. His proficiency in German (acquired through a Turkish school curriculum designed to prepare future workers for Germany) had made my grandfather especially attractive to recruiters. However, the Gastarbeiter program did not allow wives and children to accompany male workers. Not wanting to be separated from his family, my grandfather declined the opportunity and instead worked for the Turkish public railway system as a civil servant.
My father also did not end up going to Germany. Nonetheless, like other guestworker initiatives past and present, the Gastarbeiter program created the institutions, cultural norms, and gendered expectations that shaped how young men like my father earned their livelihoods: by going abroad.
And abroad he went. After a brief stint working as an engineer in Libya, my father, like many others of his generation and social milieu, was drawn to the explosion of well-paying job opportunities in Saudi Arabia. By the 1980s, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) had become, in political scientist Robert Vitalis’s words, “America’s largest single overseas private enterprise,” consolidating the power of the conservative, pro-American House of Fahd. This influx of foreign direct investment created a huge labor demand that the Fahd regime met by importing foreign workers.
The Jim Crow-style racial hierarchy that ARAMCO relied on in its camps shaped how the rest of Saudi society was organized—and how our family fit into its stratification system. At the top were the Americans, British, and other Global North ‘expats’ who staffed executive and managerial roles in companies working for and around the oil boom. Below them were the large numbers of U.S. military personnel and their families, who ensured that Saudi Arabia remained “America’s Kingdom.” In the middle were global south ‘expats’ like my father, who held relatively well-paying jobs, lived in subsidized villas and apartment flats, and sent their children to private schools. At the bottom were the maids, gardeners, construction workers, and other so-called ‘low-skilled’ migrants who, despite making the Kingdom run, could not bring their families with them, were paid poorly, and, in the absence of labor laws, remained vulnerable to employer abuse.
In 1990, Iraq annexed Kuwait, Saudi Arabia’s small but wealthy northern neighbor. I had just turned six. I was old enough to understand that international ‘politics’ had suddenly made all the grownups in my life very tense and preoccupied. Many American and British families immediately fled the country. My parents, however, like many other Global South families, decided to stay, believing that Iraq would eventually back down as the UN-mandated withdrawal deadline drew closer.
Still, they worried. Our apartment complex was near the Saudi Armed Forces’ military airbase, a prime target for Iraqi scud missiles. With a neighbor family, my mother helped transformed a bedroom into a makeshift safe room, stocking it with food, bottled water, and a battery-operated radio. They secured plastic sheeting over the windows with brown packing tape to prevent shards of glass from flying everywhere in the event of a nearby explosion.
One afternoon, a few weeks after the UN-imposed deadline had passed and the US-led coalition had begun an aerial bombing campaign against Iraq, the cartoons I was watching on the Saudi government-and-ARAMCO operated channel suddenly stopped. A red screen appeared. A calm voice, speaking first in Arabic, then in English, instructed viewers to remain calm and announced that incoming scud missiles had been detected. The eerie broadcast echoed the siren I could hear outside. I remember running to the kitchen where my mother was and telling her something was wrong. When she saw the television screen, she scooped me up, grabbed our go-bag, and rushed to the bedroom in our neighbor’s apartment, where we huddled in the makeshift shelter until the sirens finally ceased the net morning.
The sirens continued for months. Eventually, my parents decided we should drive away from Riyadh. All I remember of this time is sitting in the backseat, squished between bags of food and clothes, watching the endless highway and desert landscape pass by, caught between a sense of adventure, boredom, and confusion. We eventually arrived at Jeddah’s Casablanca Hotel, where we were sequestered with other Turkish families who had also fled Riyadh. I remember playing tag with the other Turkish children in the hotel lobby while our parents huddled together, speculating about the future. Years later, I recognized the eerie parallels between the 1942 film Casablanca and its namesake hotel that housed us during the war.
By February 1991, the U.S.-led coalition had successfully forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. There was widespread gratitude towards the Americans, one my parents shared. The Americans had not only liberated Kuwait but also ‘saved’ us. Only much later did I learn that the U.S. was taking a page out of colonial Britain’s playbook when it came to the Middle East. Like its colonial predecessor, the U.S. also actively created and maintained political cleavages in the region to suit its imperialist projects. A U.S.-backed Iraq had accumulated enormous debt (particularly to its creditor, Kuwait) during the 8-year war with Iran in the 1980s. When Kuwait refused to comply with OPEC oil quotas—quotas designed to shift power away from Anglo-American oil firms to postcolonial states—Iraq’s economy plunged into crisis. Annexing Kuwait was Iraq’s response. Protecting Saudi Arabia and its oil was the U.S.’s. Meanwhile, my family, like thousands of other foreign workers, found ourselves caught in the middle, fearful and uncertain about what the future held.
But this geopolitical quagmire ended up shaping my life in ways I could not have anticipated. The war prompted many Global North families to pull their children from Saudi Arabia. Suddenly, the so-called “international” schools—built for their white children—were left empty. Admissions policies that had privileged Global North applicants shifted. Children from Global South families were now welcome. Spotting this opening, my parents enrolled me in the Saudi Arabian International School (later renamed the American International School).
Barely able to speak English, I began my journey through the American curriculum, which proved instrumental in my ability to thrive in a world structured by U.S. hegemony. After completing the International Baccalaureate program, I went on to the University of Chicago for a BA in History and Economics, followed by an MA and a PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. These credentials—including a faculty position at the University of Toronto—gave me the requisite ‘points’ to immigrate to Canada without much difficulty. I became a Canadian citizen a few years ago, finally obtaining legal membership in the country where I live.
It is perhaps no irony that I ended up marrying a veteran of the second Gulf War. In 2003, I was in the streets of New York City protesting America’s shock-and-awe bombing campaign, while my future husband was preparing to deploy to the Middle East as a Chinook pilot. We met seven years later in Arizona: I was conducting fieldwork at the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, while he was using the GI Bill to finish a degree in Elementary Education. In many ways, our lives had been polar opposites. But what connected us was how we had both grown up middle class in a world profoundly shaped by U.S. cultural hegemony.
Looking back on my life, I am acutely aware of the social structures that shaped my biography and gave me opportunities for upward mobility. I benefited from labor migration systems that simultaneously mitigated and reproduced the violence of capitalism. I also benefited from opportunities that emerged in the interstices of U.S. imperialism and its attendant alliances, agreements, and conflicts. These macro-level processes shaped my life trajectory and granted me privileges that I will no doubt pass on to my own children.
In saying this, I do not mean to minimize my own agency or that of my parents and elders. Rather, I am mindful that as my grandparents raised their children, and my parents raised my sister and me, they made decisions under circumstances not of their own choosing.
I study migration and politics to better understand those circumstances. My ethnographic approach is driven by a desire to capture the unpredictable ways ordinary people make sense of, navigate, reinforce, and resist the structures they face. I pursue this work with the hope that such knowledge will contribute to imagining more inclusive, equitable, and peaceful futures.
My father also did not end up going to Germany. Nonetheless, like other guestworker initiatives past and present, the Gastarbeiter program created the institutions, cultural norms, and gendered expectations that shaped how young men like my father earned their livelihoods: by going abroad.
And abroad he went. After a brief stint working as an engineer in Libya, my father, like many others of his generation and social milieu, was drawn to the explosion of well-paying job opportunities in Saudi Arabia. By the 1980s, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) had become, in political scientist Robert Vitalis’s words, “America’s largest single overseas private enterprise,” consolidating the power of the conservative, pro-American House of Fahd. This influx of foreign direct investment created a huge labor demand that the Fahd regime met by importing foreign workers.
The Jim Crow-style racial hierarchy that ARAMCO relied on in its camps shaped how the rest of Saudi society was organized—and how our family fit into its stratification system. At the top were the Americans, British, and other Global North ‘expats’ who staffed executive and managerial roles in companies working for and around the oil boom. Below them were the large numbers of U.S. military personnel and their families, who ensured that Saudi Arabia remained “America’s Kingdom.” In the middle were global south ‘expats’ like my father, who held relatively well-paying jobs, lived in subsidized villas and apartment flats, and sent their children to private schools. At the bottom were the maids, gardeners, construction workers, and other so-called ‘low-skilled’ migrants who, despite making the Kingdom run, could not bring their families with them, were paid poorly, and, in the absence of labor laws, remained vulnerable to employer abuse.
In 1990, Iraq annexed Kuwait, Saudi Arabia’s small but wealthy northern neighbor. I had just turned six. I was old enough to understand that international ‘politics’ had suddenly made all the grownups in my life very tense and preoccupied. Many American and British families immediately fled the country. My parents, however, like many other Global South families, decided to stay, believing that Iraq would eventually back down as the UN-mandated withdrawal deadline drew closer.
Still, they worried. Our apartment complex was near the Saudi Armed Forces’ military airbase, a prime target for Iraqi scud missiles. With a neighbor family, my mother helped transformed a bedroom into a makeshift safe room, stocking it with food, bottled water, and a battery-operated radio. They secured plastic sheeting over the windows with brown packing tape to prevent shards of glass from flying everywhere in the event of a nearby explosion.
One afternoon, a few weeks after the UN-imposed deadline had passed and the US-led coalition had begun an aerial bombing campaign against Iraq, the cartoons I was watching on the Saudi government-and-ARAMCO operated channel suddenly stopped. A red screen appeared. A calm voice, speaking first in Arabic, then in English, instructed viewers to remain calm and announced that incoming scud missiles had been detected. The eerie broadcast echoed the siren I could hear outside. I remember running to the kitchen where my mother was and telling her something was wrong. When she saw the television screen, she scooped me up, grabbed our go-bag, and rushed to the bedroom in our neighbor’s apartment, where we huddled in the makeshift shelter until the sirens finally ceased the net morning.
The sirens continued for months. Eventually, my parents decided we should drive away from Riyadh. All I remember of this time is sitting in the backseat, squished between bags of food and clothes, watching the endless highway and desert landscape pass by, caught between a sense of adventure, boredom, and confusion. We eventually arrived at Jeddah’s Casablanca Hotel, where we were sequestered with other Turkish families who had also fled Riyadh. I remember playing tag with the other Turkish children in the hotel lobby while our parents huddled together, speculating about the future. Years later, I recognized the eerie parallels between the 1942 film Casablanca and its namesake hotel that housed us during the war.
By February 1991, the U.S.-led coalition had successfully forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. There was widespread gratitude towards the Americans, one my parents shared. The Americans had not only liberated Kuwait but also ‘saved’ us. Only much later did I learn that the U.S. was taking a page out of colonial Britain’s playbook when it came to the Middle East. Like its colonial predecessor, the U.S. also actively created and maintained political cleavages in the region to suit its imperialist projects. A U.S.-backed Iraq had accumulated enormous debt (particularly to its creditor, Kuwait) during the 8-year war with Iran in the 1980s. When Kuwait refused to comply with OPEC oil quotas—quotas designed to shift power away from Anglo-American oil firms to postcolonial states—Iraq’s economy plunged into crisis. Annexing Kuwait was Iraq’s response. Protecting Saudi Arabia and its oil was the U.S.’s. Meanwhile, my family, like thousands of other foreign workers, found ourselves caught in the middle, fearful and uncertain about what the future held.
But this geopolitical quagmire ended up shaping my life in ways I could not have anticipated. The war prompted many Global North families to pull their children from Saudi Arabia. Suddenly, the so-called “international” schools—built for their white children—were left empty. Admissions policies that had privileged Global North applicants shifted. Children from Global South families were now welcome. Spotting this opening, my parents enrolled me in the Saudi Arabian International School (later renamed the American International School).
Barely able to speak English, I began my journey through the American curriculum, which proved instrumental in my ability to thrive in a world structured by U.S. hegemony. After completing the International Baccalaureate program, I went on to the University of Chicago for a BA in History and Economics, followed by an MA and a PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. These credentials—including a faculty position at the University of Toronto—gave me the requisite ‘points’ to immigrate to Canada without much difficulty. I became a Canadian citizen a few years ago, finally obtaining legal membership in the country where I live.
It is perhaps no irony that I ended up marrying a veteran of the second Gulf War. In 2003, I was in the streets of New York City protesting America’s shock-and-awe bombing campaign, while my future husband was preparing to deploy to the Middle East as a Chinook pilot. We met seven years later in Arizona: I was conducting fieldwork at the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, while he was using the GI Bill to finish a degree in Elementary Education. In many ways, our lives had been polar opposites. But what connected us was how we had both grown up middle class in a world profoundly shaped by U.S. cultural hegemony.
Looking back on my life, I am acutely aware of the social structures that shaped my biography and gave me opportunities for upward mobility. I benefited from labor migration systems that simultaneously mitigated and reproduced the violence of capitalism. I also benefited from opportunities that emerged in the interstices of U.S. imperialism and its attendant alliances, agreements, and conflicts. These macro-level processes shaped my life trajectory and granted me privileges that I will no doubt pass on to my own children.
In saying this, I do not mean to minimize my own agency or that of my parents and elders. Rather, I am mindful that as my grandparents raised their children, and my parents raised my sister and me, they made decisions under circumstances not of their own choosing.
I study migration and politics to better understand those circumstances. My ethnographic approach is driven by a desire to capture the unpredictable ways ordinary people make sense of, navigate, reinforce, and resist the structures they face. I pursue this work with the hope that such knowledge will contribute to imagining more inclusive, equitable, and peaceful futures.
