Dr. Azat Gündoğan

Azat Gündoğan is an Honors Program faculty member at Florida State University. He is an urban sociologist whose research interests stand at the junction of urban sociology, social movements, Middle East studies, and Kurdish and Turkish studies. In addition to his articles in urban studies journals such as CITY and Urban Geography, Azat published articles and book chapters on the Kurdish liberation movement in the 1960s and authoritarianism in Turkey.

During his time at the Max Planck Institute, Azat will work on his book, provisionally titled The Backwater: Extended Urbanization in Greater Istanbul. This work seeks to develop a holistic understanding of how the relentless growth of Istanbul – now classified as a third-tier global city – has formed and transformed its peripheries and how the makers of peripheral cities, migrant laborers, have negotiated living and working conditions in relation to the outlying status of their city. His methodology combines urban ethnography, archival research in official archives and local/national periodicals, and governance and policy analysis.