Ayse Caglar (Incoming Fellow 2024-25)

University Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna.
Permanent Fellow, IWM Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna

Extractivism and confined labor are typically associated with colonialism, which occludes their
broader geographical, historical, and contemporary relevance. In her project, "Extractivism, Dis-
placed Labor, and Confined Lives in City-Making", Professor Caglar centers on extraction within
Europe and aims to advance the scholarship that puts extractivism, forced labor, and migrant and
displaced lives at the heart of global capitalist processes. Building on ethnographic and archival
research on Linz and Essen, Professor Caglar traces the continuities in the political economy of
the containment and governance of the displaced as inscribed in different labor regimes across time.
This is a project striving to rehistoricize and retheorize the politics of migration and city-making in
(and beyond) Europe.