Associate Professor

Boğaziçi University, Istanbul

“Social Work and the Politics of the Family at the Crossroads of Welfare Reform in Turkey.” 2007.

Berna Yazıcı is a socio-cultural anthropologist with interests in the politics of welfare and the family; gender; anthropology of the state and urban transport and mobility. Her dissertation fieldwork, funded by the Wenner-Gren Anthropology Foundation, examined the state’s politics of welfare and the family in the context of broader socio-political dynamics in Turkey. Articles based on this research appeared in the journals, Anthropological Quarterly and New Perspectives on Turkey. In addition, Yazıcı also works on the relationship between urban transport and social inequality. Her article entitled “Towards an Anthropology of Traffic” published in the journal, Ethnos and her chapter entitled “Life in Gridlock” published in the urban anthropology reader, Urban Life argue that the daily experience of traffic is a theoretically  underutilized medium for examining social inequality in a global, urban social order. Yazıcı’s current research focuses on child protection policy and institutions in Turkey. Drawing on the anthropologies of the state, policy and kinship, she ethnographically explores the long-term effects that the state policy and bureaucratic institutions have on individuals’ lives.