2020 LSA Collegiate Fellow (Women's and Gender Studies)
About
Seda Saluk received her PhD in anthropology and a graduate certificate in women, gender, sexuality studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She specializes in medical anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and Middle East studies. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, Fulbright-IIE, and several University of Massachusetts fellowships. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Collaborative Anthropologies, Anthropos, and Anthropology News, as well as edited volumes such as Political Thought in Modern Turkey: Feminism.
As a first-generation immigrant scholar, Seda Saluk's research and teaching is shaped by values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is committed to making higher education accessible, inspiring, and a tool for social justice for all students. At the University of Massachusetts, she designed workshops and community-building events for international students of color in the Five College Consortium. Dr. Saluk has also done significant work in publishing and translation to make cross-border traveling of knowledge production possible. She currently serves on the editorial board of the open-access journal Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaşımlar (Feminist Approaches in Culture and Politics).
Current Work:
Seda Saluk's current book project, Monitored Reproduction: Surveillance, Labor, and Care in Pro-Natalist Turkey, offers an ethnographic analysis of reproductive surveillance in Turkey, more specifically concentrating on big data infrastructures used in maternal and infant health services. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in clinics and homes, this project examines how data-driven technologies unfold in different communities' everyday lives along the axes of gender, class, and ethnicity. Building on the theme of reproductive and public health governance, Dr. Saluk is also developing two new projects, one on the political genealogy of reproductive rights activism in Turkey and the second on sociopolitical dimensions of vaccine hesitancy.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Feminist studies of science, technology, and medicine; anthropology of reproduction and public health; postcolonial and transnational feminism(s); Middle East studies
