Status Audio Magazine

Omar S. Dahi is a research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and associate professor of economics at Hampshire College. He has published in academic outlets such as the Journal of Development Economics, Applied Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Political Geography, Middle East Report, Forced Migration Review, and Critical Studies on Security. His last book was South-South Trade and Finance in the 21st Century: Rise of the South or a Second Great Divergence (co-authored with Firat Demir). From 2014-2018 Dahi served as a Lead Expert on the UN ESCWA's National Agenda for the Future of Syria program. He is a co-founder and coordinator of the Beirut School of Critical Security Studies and the Latin East initiative. Dahi is the project director of Security in Context.

Utku Balaban is an associate professor of sociology. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from SUNY Binghamton in 2011 and taught on various campuses in New York and Pennsylvania until 2012. He served as a faculty member at the Department of Labor Economics and Industrial Relations at Ankara University between 2012 and 2017. He was expelled from his position with a statutory decree in February 2017 under the state of emergency. His first book, A Conveyor Belt of Flesh (Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 2010) presents the findings of his dissertation fieldwork on the garment industry in Istanbul, Turkey. In his second book, Social Inclusion Policies in Turkey (Ankara University Press, 2015), Dr. Balaban surveys the current state of social policy in Turkey.

As a grantee of the European Commission’s Marie Curie Career Reintegration Grant, he pursued fieldwork on the industrializing cities in Turkey between 2012 and 2016. As a non-resident research fellow of Forum Transregionale Studien and Humboldt University’s IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History (Berlin, Germany), Dr. Balaban is currently working on his new book project on the relationship between Islamism and late industrial development in Turkey, embarking upon the aforementioned fieldwork on industrializing cities in Turkey.

E. Ahmet Tonak is the author and editor of several books including Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts (with Anwar Shaikh), Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives (edited with Irvin Schick) and Marxism and Classes (edited with Sungur Savran and Kurtar Tanyılmaz). Trained as a mechanical engineer at Istanbul Technical University, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research. Tonak taught for many years at Istanbul Bilgi University, Middle East Technical University, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and is currently a visiting professor at UMASS Amherst and works as an economist at Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, Inter-regional Office, Northampton, Massachusetts. He wrote for several Turkish dailies and contributes to sendika.org, an alternative news portal in Turkey.

Zümray Kutlu received her bachelor's and master's degrees in sociology from Middle East Technical University (METU), a master's in theory and practice of human rights from the University of Essex, and her doctorate in political science from Istanbul Bilgi University.

Her teaching and research focus on refugees, urbanization, urban inequality and human rights. She worked more than 15 years in various nongovernmental organizations, where she developed and supervised projects on participatory policy development, cultural rights, cultural heritage and refugees.

Previously, Kutlu taught at Istanbul Bilgi University and Bahçesehir University, and in 2017–18 she was a visiting assistant professor at Hampshire College.