Dr Yael Navaro-Yashin
Senior Lecturer; Fellow, Newnham College
email: yn213 [at] cam.ac.uk
Research interests: the anthropology of politics; ethnography of the state; anthropology of law; bureaucracies, administration, and documentary practices; affect, subjectivity, and the emotions; space, materiality, and the built environment; crossing points between conflict resolution, organizational culture, disciplinary knowledge practices, and international law.
My research to date has explored affect and subjectivity in the domains of politics, the public sphere, law, and bureaucracy. In Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2002), I explored new ethnographic sites for the study, articulation, and imagination of the political in documenting how the Turkish public has been subjectively involved in producing ‘fantasies about the state’. This interest led me, in further and more recent research, to study the unrecognized state in Northern Cyprus and its administration through questions about affect in a post-war environment. In my forthcoming book The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-War Polity (Duke University Press, 2012) based on this research, I study affect in zones of ruination and abandonment, in materialities left behind and expropriated in the aftermath of war, as well as in the documentary practices, administration, and economy of an illegal administration.
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