I am a political scientist, urbanist and critical animal studies scholar with an interest in medical, legal and infrastructural worlds of human-animal entanglements. I am a passionate advocate for animal rights, dedicated to unraveling the complexities of human-animal relationships through a multidisciplinary lens. My work explores the politics of violence and care towards animals, and their myriad material forms: animals forced mobilities through urban landscapes; infrastructural incursions and failures; daily, random and improvised performances of protection, neglect and hostility; the interstitial making of ruins and survival; affective regimes of shared precarity, witnessing to and denial of suffering; legal framework of rights and welfare; technocratic, scientific and medical ordering of life and death. 

My main area of specialization is urban animals with a thematic focus on politics of infrastructure, carcerality and mobility across marginalized landscapes of poverty, improvised worlds of subsistence, material and affective regimes of endurance in cities. My work is attentive to the ways animality and marginality are sedimented into disturbed landscapes. I focus on how daily, random and improvised encounters with the animals upend the experience of poverty, destitution and precarity; daily practices and meanings of place-making, boundary-drawing and belonging for many marginalized human denizens. 

I earned my Ph.D. in Politics from The New School for Social Research where I developed a keen interest in the intricate relationships between politics, practices and meanings of violence and care towards animals particularly in cities. 

I work at the intersection of scholarly  research and community organizing, field research, and grassroot movements. My scholarly work on human-animal bond has helped me to cultivate passion, interest and strong political motivation for animal rights advocacy and community-based work. I am passionate about developing theoretical, academic and intellectual frames of human-animal bond. My political and intellectual engagement is motivated to contribute to thinking, writing and acting that can reinforce daily practices of compassion, empathy, loving and taking care of animals - particularly those that depend on human care for living. I work for legal advocacy for animal rights and welfare, for community organizing with a diverse set of animal lovers, vegan activists, animal health professionals, rescue volunteers, care workers, lawyers and legislators. Expressing these multiple sources of my scholarly expertise and political engagement, my works have appeared in a wide range of venues- academic journals to newspapers, books to magazines, curatorial statements to exhibition texts, documentaries to TV shows, radio broadcasts and podcasts. 

I am also the general coordinator of the research-led animal rights and urban studies organization, called Dört Ayaklı Şehir | The Four-Legged City: Urban, Nature, Animal Studies Association. I work for project development in animal rescue and resilience projects. As an expert researcher and rescue professional, I have, sadly, experience in fields of mass destruction and heavy disturbance. As a coordinator of the international animal rescue program called From Ruins to Life (Enkazdan Hayata), I have been developing research and training programs that aim to collectively imagine, design and shape our future from under ruins and rubbles - to a resilient future from out of our shared vulnerabilities and precarities we share with more-than-humans.