Dr Kevin Yildirim

I am currently a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College. Previously, I received my PhD and MPhil degrees in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and studied before this at Concordia University in Montreal and Istanbul Technical University.

My research interests are in the study of labour, migration, citizenship, and morality. For my PhD, I conducted fieldwork among workers in Turkey’s vast informal recycling industry, which since 2011 has increasingly become a source of employment for irregular migrants from countries in the Middle East and beyond. The question I asked during this research project was: how has the newfound presence of migrant workers in the recycling industry changed the ways in which Turkish citizens conceive of economic and political justice? In answering this question the research contributed to anthropological debates on the subjects of work, moral economy, citizenship, hospitality, and urban politics.