Congratulations to PhD student Pelin Gül for winning the Muriel D. Bissell International Travel Award in support of her dissertation proposal “Understanding Post-Disaster Reconstruction Under Capitalism: An Ethnography of Hatay, Turkiye”. Gül's research examines how societies rebuild themselves in the aftermath of disaster, asking whether and how reconstruction offers opportunities for disrupting structural inequalities and unsustainable urban development. The Muriel D. Bissell Award will support her fieldwork in Hatay, Turkiye, a city badly destroyed by the earthquake that rocked the region on February 6th, 2023. Drawing on the case of Hatay, a diverse city with a history of political resistance against the right-wing AKP government, Gül examines how critical times present political opportunities for collective action and social change.
Pelin Gül is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. She is a political sociologist studying how top-down state responses to disasters influence pre-existing socio-economic and ethno-religious inequalities. Empirically, she aims to foster interest among social scientists in studying contexts beyond the Global North by utilizing insights from the Global South.