About me

I am Professor of Geography and The Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education at The Graduate School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I served as the co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2014-2018). I also have a joint appointment in the Curriculum in Global Studies and adjunct appointment in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. I received my PhD in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle and MA in Sociology/Anthropology from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. I was awarded the 2017 Chapman Family University Teaching Award and the 2018 American Association of Geographers Enhancing Diversity Award. I co-directed Duke in Istanbul summer program in 2012 and 2013 and Duke Middle East in Europe summer program (based in Berlin) in 2018 and 2019.

My research examines bodies, intimacy, and everyday spaces as key sites of politics and geopolitics. I situate my work in the fields of geography of religion and feminist political and cultural geographies, engage feminist and social theory, and use a multiplicity of methods, including focus groups, interviews, visual analysis, discourse analysis, and surveys in my projects. I am interested in religion beyond the ‘officially sacred’ and politics beyond elections and state institutions but as manifest in and produced by ordinary people and the ways they make their bodies, traverse spaces of everyday urban life, and encounter others as differently positioned subjects. My research has contributed to understanding embodied and lived experiences of religion and secularism, the production of social difference, and the formation of subjects, borders, and territory. My research trajectory started with a focus on Turkey to study contemporary formations of Muslim femininity during a time when being a Muslim woman was (and remains) a highly contested (geo)political issue. In a series of editorials and articles, I analyze the embodied, racialized, and gendered politics of populist political movements from Trump to Erdoğan, as well as feminism and social justice in the US and in Europe (specifically Germany) as well. I am also a part of the feminist geography collective FLOCK.

You can find out more about me and my work at my website: https://www.banugokariksel.com/

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