Başak Can

Overview

I have a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and am currently Associate Professor at Koç University's Department of Sociology, an affiliate at the Global Health Master Program, Center for Infectious Diseases, and a regular contributor to Medical School’s Public Health module at Koç University. My research revolves around three lines of inquiry. The first concerns the role of medical care and documentation in the aftermath of political violence and problematizes the relationship between politics and medical neutrality. Drawing upon an ethnography of doctors specialized in torture documentation and archival research on forensic documents of torture in Turkey, my first book Forensic Fantasies: Doctors, Documents and the Limits of Truth in Turkey is forthcoming at the University of Pennsylvania Press.
The second mode of my scholarly inquiry explores the intersections of manual labour, gender, and the body with a focus on the question of reproductive justice. I have published a number of articles on the health and bodily experiences of women at work and home in different settings in the Turkish context, showing how reproductive decisions and experiences are key to the formation of not only labor markets and healthcare infrastructures but also practical and affective solidarity ties and care networks among women.
Finally, I have conducted two different research on the health impacts of pandemic. First, thanks to the funding from Social Science Research Council, we did more than 80 phone and face-to-face interviews with workers who were suffering from occupational illnesses during the height of the pandemic lockdowns, examining how low-income manual workers navigated the tension between work and health as sick workers. We also inquired into the Covid-19 pandemic by examining how Turkey’s elderly populations were sacrificed in the name of care and the result was published in a collective book project titled Economy and Society in the Time of the Pandemic (The University of Chicago Press 2021).
Currently, I’m researching the relationship between environment, social justice, and cancer in Turkey. I ask how different local actors (healthcare professionals, state authorities, patients, families, environment activists, and patient rights groups) elaborate on the causality of and solutions to cancers vis-à-vis the “environment” in the age of Anthropocene in Turkey’s heavy industry zones. What role does environment play in folk and expert theories of etiology, prognosis, and treatment of cancer? Theoretically invested in interdisciplinary research questions, I believe that we need a comprehensive framework that explores how different actors mobilize environmental factors for different purposes and examines how diverse understandings of “environment” clash in local settings, creating consequences for both action and inaction.

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