Description:

Berna Turam is the Associate Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Northeastern University. She has an abiding interest in conducting ethnography on state-society interaction, government and the city, urban space and democracy, political Islam and ordinary Muslim people, religion and politics, secularisms, and politics of gender Middle East. She is the author of Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford University Press, 2007), and Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin (Stanford University Press, 2015) and the editor of Secular State and Religious Society: Two Forces at Play in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is a collaborator in an NSF-funded comparative research project on Darwin and creationism in the Muslim world. Most recently, her article, entitled “Primacy of Space in Politics: Bargaining Space, Power and Freedom in an Istanbul neighborhood,” won the best article award from the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Dr. Turam will be presenting a paper titled, “Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin.”