Assistant Professor, Department of Economics at Istanbul Technical University

Umut is an LSE-trained economic anthropologist focusing on the economics of waste and recycling, rural development, poverty alleviation, livelihood creation, and the elimination of child labour in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, and more recently along the north-eastern Mediterranean coast. He is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ). From 2014 to 2016, he conducted a long-term ethnographic study in a steel mill, recycling war scrap near the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) on the south-western border of Iraqi Kurdistan. This research has recently been documented in a book entitled Building from Scrap: War, Labour and Recycling in Iraqi Kurdistan, published by Palgrave Macmillan in June 2022. Having been awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-PhD Research Grant for 2023-2024, he has started researching the emerging economic geography of waste-scape, in particular the circulation and inter-mixing of water, pesticides, and plastics along the north-eastern Mediterranean coast. In addition to his academic work, he has worked with international humanitarian and development organisations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), the EBRD, UNICEF, the World Bank and GIZ on programme evaluation and the design of evidence-based interventions related to conditional cash transfer programmes, refugee protection, livelihoods, and the elimination of child labour. He was awarded the British Council COP26 Climate Change Grant for research on the plastic footprint of agriculture, and is now also affiliated with ZMO, the Leibniz Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin, where he is a research fellow focusing on the study of waste in post-disaster contexts.