Author: Sinem Kavak

Sinem Kavak is a critical agrarian studies scholar from Turkey. She received her PhD degree in Political Science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris Saclay and Boğaziçi University in May 2017 with a specialization on international political economy. Her PhD dissertation, Rethinking the Political Economy of Contemporary Water Struggles in Turkey: Space, Structures and Altered Agencies from a Comparative Perspective, explores the links between livelihood transformations and peasant mobilizations against the commodification of rivers. The dissertation rests on comparative analysis of differentiation of peasant livelihoods and how these affects the discourses, agency and success of mobilizations. Her masters’ thesis is on the neoliberalization of tobacco market in Turkey and explores the uneven transformation of peasant livelihoods and patterns of rural restructuring within the literature of new peasantry. She takes part in research projects on multiple export commodities such as hazelnut, cotton, tea and sugar beet. In these projects, she focuses both on relations of production and on rural labour (more specifically seasonal migrant workers). She published an article titled “Syrian Refugees and Turkish Migrants in Seasonal Agricultural Work: A Case of Adverse Incorporation in Turkey” and co-authored research reports in Turkish, on seasonal agricultural work.” She worked as a lecturer in Boğaziçi University where she taught “Agrarian Change and Social Policy: Markets, Peasants and Rural Poverty” Currently, she is a Raoul Wallenberg Institute postdoctoral fellow at Lund University, with a project problematizing forced labour-unfree labour binary rural labour.