Ayşe Çağlar

Visiting Toronto Metropolitan University

Fall 2025

Research focus while a CERC Scholar 

While at CERC Migration, Ayşe Çağlar will finalize her book, which traces the political economy of containment and governance of the displaced as inscribed in different labour regimes across time in two former steel industry hub cities. Based on ethnographic and archival research this project strives to re-historicize and retheorize the politics of migration and city-making in relationship to the transformations of capitalism since the 1930s, in (and beyond) Europe.

Career achievements

Ayşe Çağlar is a sociologist and an anthropologist. She is a University Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna and is a permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. She held several visiting professorships in different European universities (Oxford, Stockholm, Zurich, Budapest) and fellowships such as Jean Monnet (EUI, Florence), Minerva (Max Planck, Göttingen) and at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School. She is a member of Academia Europaea. She has been co-directing the research platforms Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration at IWM with the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, as well as the Challenges of Urban Futures: Governing the complexities in European cities, at the University of Vienna. 

Çağlar's work and publications focus on the interfaces of migration, urban restructuring, dispossession, displacement, confined labour, extractivism, and the transformations of statehood and the governance of cities. Most of her work is comparative and there is a special emphasis on disempowered cities and cities that had been exposed to destruction and reconstruction particularly by wars. She has edited, co-edited and co-authored Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants (Cornell University Press, 2010); Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration (Duke University Press, 2018); Urbaner Protest. Revolte in der neoliberalen Stadt (Passagen Verlag, 2019); Displacements and Dispossessions (Refugee Watch 2020); Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas (Albany: SUNY Press (2024). A Special Issue “Situating global warfare in historical conjuncture” (forthc. 2025) Focaal; A Special Issue on “Digitised Migration: Entangled and Uneven Landscapes” (forthc. 2025), International Migration.

Relevant publications

(forthcoming) "Destruction and extraction: reading Wolf at the edge of Europe." In: Don Kalb and Susana Narotzky eds. Fifty years of Europe and the People Without History. Berghahn.

(forthcoming) "Introduction – Looking at Warfare through the Lens of Accumulation: extraction and historical conjuncture" (co-authored with Seda Yüksel-Pecen) in Situating Global Warfare in Historical Conjuncture, Focaal, Special Issue co-edited with Seda Yüksel-Pecen.

(2025). "Expanded extractivism, confinement, and (im)mobilized labor in city-making: a longue durée perspective." Dialectical Anthropology. January.

(2024). "Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas," co-edited with Ranabir Samaddar and Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

(2024). "Looking through the lens of 'essential workers': a landscape of (im)mobility, labor, and social reproduction." Dialectical Anthropology. July.

(2023). "Making the convert speak: The production of truth and the 'apparatus of conversion' in Austria" (co-authored with Markus Elias Ramsauer). In: Asylum and Conversion to Christianity in Europe: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Edited by Ebru Öztürk & Lena Rose. Bloomsbury.

(2022). "Reorganization of borders, migrant workers, and the coloniality of power." 25th Anniversary Special Issue of Citizenship Studies. Citizenship Studies 26(4-5): 401-410.

(2021). "Relational Multiscalar Analysis: A Comparative Approach to Migrants within City-Making Processes" (co-authored with Nina Glick Schiller) Geographical Review 111.

(2018). "Migrants and City Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration" co-authored with Nina Glick Schiller, Durham: Duke University Press.

(2011). "Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants" co-edited with Nina Glick Schiller. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.