Rate My Professor Zerrin Ozlem Biner

Dr Zerrin Özlem Biner is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS University of London. She specializes in political and legal anthropology, with research focusing on themes of state, citizenship, political violence, forced displacement and return, memory, heritage, property, diasporic communities, ethnic and religious minority citizens, refugees, reconciliation processes, and solidarity practices in conflict and post-conflict settings. For over two decades, she has conducted ethnographic research on the political, social, and psychic effects of the protracted conflict in Southeastern Turkey's border provinces, incorporating perspectives from Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs/Assyrians, and diasporic communities in Sweden and Germany. Her work also examines the waiting experiences of Syrian refugees in Turkish border towns and political subjectivities in sites of violence where ethical dimensions are constructed. Biner collaborates internationally with scholars from the UK, Switzerland, Germany, and Turkey on political violence and legal anthropology.

Biner serves as Convener of the MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies and is a member of the editorial advisory board of the BIAA-IB Tauris Contemporary Turkey series. She is the Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded Archives of Solidarity project, which employs oral history, ethnography, literary, and audio-visual methods to create a multi-modal digital archive of solidarity practices between citizens and refugees in Turkey and the UK, involving partners like Kırkayak Kültür in Turkey and Kent Refugee Action Network in the UK. Her key publications include the monograph States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Co-existence in Southeast Turkey (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), nominated for the 2021 Victor Turner Prize. She co-edited Reverberations: Violence across Time and Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) with Yael Navaro, Alice von Bieberstein, and Seda Altuğ, and Law Against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law’s Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2012) with Julia Eckert, Brian Donahoe, and Christian Strümpell. Additionally, she co-edited a special section on the Politics of Waiting in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute with Özge Biner.