Sinan Erensü

Assistant Professor of Sociology

About

I am a sociologist influenced by the political ecology tradition, interested in the social and cultural politics of urban and environmental change. I enjoy studying infrastructures, an unlikely topic for sociology, but a revealing one regardless. Energy systems, urban parks, shopping malls, and coal mines may seem technical or boring, yet they quietly shape power, economy, inequality, and everyday life.I am also interested in competing ideas and narratives about the environment, broadly conceived. I study environmentalism not only as a struggle over material resources, but also as a way people come to know, narrate, and value nature and climate change. I examine how acting for (and with) the environment can open up new political possibilities, while at times narrowing what can be seen, said, or contested.I predominantly produce work on Turkey, but I hope that my interventions speak to broader debates on rampant authoritarianism, the commodification of nature, and contemporary urban transformations. I have long experience in ethnography and other qualitative methods, yet recently I have been experimenting with survey-based research, partly driven by my interest in conspiracy theories and their role in shaping environmental and political attitudes.Outside academia, I play online chess with misplaced confidence and table tennis with solid technique and consistently disappointing results.

Contact

You can usually find me at Boğaziçi University, where I teach and serve as the vice-chair of the Department of Sociology. I am also involved with the Center for Spatial Justice, an Istanbul-based urban and environmental research collective.

Boğaziçi Üniversitesi
Sosyoloji Bölümü
34342 Bebek/İstanbul+90 212 359 7319
[email protected]