Vita
Umut Yıldırım is currently working on her first monograph on war, resistance, and dissonance in Turkey (forthcoming, Aras Publishing House, Istanbul, 2019). The book is an attempt to foreground the role of negative affects in the conceptualization of resistance in a colonial context where practices of guerrilla war coincide with neoliberal experimentations with displaced Kurdish communities. The book is based on her doctoral dissertation, which she completed in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2011. Before Cambridge, she completed her master degrees in history at the Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and social anthropology at the London School of Economic and Political Science, London.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the state and sovereignty, of neoliberalism, ecological anthropology, autonomous, decolonial, and indigenous resistance, and theories of affect and subjectivity. She has taught graduate courses on affect, resistance, and neoliberalism at different universities in Istanbul and published anthropological articles as well as opinion pieces on the urban commons, affective modes of political organizing, and state sovereignty in Anthropological Theory, Cultural Anthropology, and autonomous platforms.
