Oğuz Alyanak

Team

Oğuz Alyanak is a cultural anthropologist whose research spans labor migration, urban studies, religion, and masculinity. For his dissertation research, he studied the Turkish community in Strasbourg, focusing on men’s nightlives, and exploring the moral tenets of male socialization primarily in three domains: work, home, and the outside. As part of this research, he worked at a döner kebab shop, and socialized with Turkish men in their workspaces and after work in their homes, mosque associations, coffeehouses, and migrant-populated neighborhoods (quartiers), as well as their automobiles, joining his interlocutors for car rides to various venues in Strasbourg, France, its German neighbor, Kehl, and other cities in the Franco-German borderland. He has also collaborated with a Strasbourg-based documentarist to produce an ethnographic documentary on migrant socialization in Koenigshoffen, aka “quartier Istanbul,” a neighborhood in Strasbourg (link to trailer). He is currently working on a book manuscript and academic articles based on this research.

Following his PhD (WUSTL 2019), Oğuz moved to Germany as a Volkswagen Stiftung postdoctoral fellow (University of Göttingen 2019/2020). Starting April 2021, he has taken on a postdoctoral researcher position at the Fairwork project, joining a team of scholars to explore working conditions in platform work/the gig economy in Germany. He is also a visiting researcher of the “Globalization, Work, and Production” research group at the WZB/Berlin Social Science Center.

Recent publications:

• In press. “Turkey’s Diyanet and Political Islam During the Pandemic.” In Viral Loads. Edited by L. Manderson, N. Burke, and A. Wahlberg. London: UCL Press.
• 2021. “The Sultan and His Sycophants: Erdoğan is Leading Turkey towards a Bleak Future.” openDemocracy.
• 2022. “Chronic, not Crisis: Why We Need More than Sympathy to Talk About Workers’ Health amid the Pandemic.” Society for the Anthropology of Work.
• 2020. “Crisis in Göttingen’s Corona High-Rises: Rethinking Urban Justice amid the Pandemic.” City & Society.
• 2020. “Fais de ton mieux, Allah s’occupe du reste: less Turcs musulmans négocient le Halal à Strasbourg.” In Religions et Alimentation. Edited by R. Gounelle, A. L. Zwilling and Y. Lehmann. Turnhout: Brepols. Pp. 135-153.