Biography
(she/her)
Tuba Akin is a graduate student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She studied Romani organizational dynamics in Turkey through the hybridization of civil society and social movement organizations, inter-organizational networks, and relationships with national and international institutions in her M.S. thesis in the Sociology department at Middle East Technical University in Turkey. She seeks to study transnational inter-organizational dynamics among Romani organizations in Turkey and Europe to better understand Romani mobilization in Turkey. Moreover, she focuses on how subjects of different Roma communities appropriate and reconfigure diverse political discourses in their socialization processes, organization strategies, and public expressions of identity. She is also a pro-Roma Roma rights activist who has worked with different Romani CSOs since 2019.
Research Interests
Social Movements and Collective Action; ethnic mobilization, inter-organizational dynamics, hybridization of social movements and civil society, human rights and activism; Linguistic Anthropology; political discourse, language and ethnicity; Romani Studies in Europe and Turkey.
Education
Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, In Progress
M.S., Sociology (2022), Middle East Technical University
B.S., Sociology (2018), Middle East Technical University