Salih Can Açiksöz

Salih-Can-Açiksöz

Salih Can Açiksöz

Associate Professor

Office: 305 Haines Hall

Email: aciksoz@ucla.edu


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Biography

I am an interdisciplinary-minded anthropologist working at the intersection of political violence, gender, health, and embodiment. My first book “Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey” (University of California Press, 2019) centers on disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war. Chronicling veteran’s post-injury lives and political activism, the book examines how veterans’ experiences of war and disability are closely linked to class, gender, and ultimately the embrace of ultranationalist right-wing politics. Sacrificial Limbs won the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, MES Book Award Honorable Mention from the American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section, the Fatema Mernissi Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, and the Fuat Köprülü Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly Book Forum on Sacrificial Limbs

My new book project, “Humanitarian Borderlands,” explores the political contestations over medical humanitarian aid in the policed and militarized spaces of the contemporary Middle East. I analyze how new forms of medical care and ethics emerge in zones of political violence through a struggle over the meanings of health, humanitarianism, neutrality, human rights, and terrorism. In addition to these two long-term projects, I have a perennial interest in reproductive politics and fascist and populist movements. You can find the PDFs of some of my most recent work below.

Publications

2020    Prosthetic Debts: Economies of War Disability in Neoliberal Turkey. Current Anthropology 61(21): S000-S000. (Electronically published before print version, DOI: 10.1086/705654)

2019    Sacrificial Limbs: Disability, Masculinity, and Political Violence in Turkey. Oakland: University of California Press. (Read introduction here)

2017    “Grab’Em by the Patriarchy.” Anthropology News 58(3): 10–12. link

2017    He Is a Lynched Soldier Now Coup, Militarism, and Masculinity in Turkey. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 13(1): 178-180. PDF

2016    Beyond “the Lesser Evil”: A Critical Engagement with Brexit. Social Anthropology 24(4): 487-488. (co-authored with Umut Yildirim) PDF

2016    Medical Humanitarianism Under Atmospheric Violence: Healthcare Workers in the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 40(2): 198-222. PDF

2015    Ghosts Within: Genealogies of War Trauma in Turkey. The Journal of Turkish and Ottoman Studies 2(2): 259-280. PDF

2015    In Vitro Nationalism: Masculinity, Disability and Assisted Reproduction in War Torn Turkey. In Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures, edited by Gul Ozyegin. Farnham: Ashgate. PDF

2014    Ghazis or Beggars: The Double Life of Turkish Disabled Veterans. Ethnologie Française 2014(2): 247-256. PDF

2013    Masculinized Power, Queered Resistance. Cultural Anthropology Online, October 31, 2013. link

2012    Sacrificial Limbs of Sovereignty: Disabled Veterans, Masculinity, and Nationalist Politics in Turkey. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26(1): 4-26. PDF