
Ayşegül Kayagil
Ayşegül Kayagil is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her research pertains to race, ethnicity, Turkish nationalism, and the legacy of slavery in the Middle East.
Ayşegül Kayagil is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her research pertains to race, ethnicity, Turkish nationalism, and the legacy of slavery in the Middle East. She is currently investigating how the newly emerging Afro-Turk identity stands in the broader topography of identities in Turkey.
At GIDEST, Ayşegül will work on mapping urban and rural sites that have been significant for Afro-Turks’ self-identification, and for tracing legacies of slavery in Turkey. Visualizing her dissertation research, she is striving to make her work accessible to a larger audience and join the efforts to break barriers between academia and its “research subjects.” Bringing alternative histories to the fore, the map will thus not only speak to the need for new historiographies but also contribute to broader scholarship on slavery and racial capitalism.
She has published on the semantics of racial and ethnic identifications in Turkey. Previously she was a Swedish Institute Fellow at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity, and Society (REMESO).