Dr. Mine Yıldırım Joined KHAS Core Program as a Visiting Scholar

Kadir Has University Core Program (Department of Core Academics) strengthens its academic staff with new scholars. We are delighted and proud to introduce our new colleague, Dr. Mine Yıldırım.

Dr. Yıldırım completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Boğaziçi University, Department of Political Science and International Relations. She focused on the criticism of subjectivity and different conceptions underlying contemporary identity politics in her master’s thesis.

She received her PhD from The New School University, Department of Political Science via her dissertation titled “Between Care and Violence: İstanbul’s Street Dogs” and was nominated for the Best Research and Outstanding Academic Activity Award of the Year. She received many awards and grants during her doctoral research. She examined the capital accumulation, public space regulations, and infrastructure politics that encompassed the lives of stray animals, the love for animals, altruism, and politics of animal rights in Istanbul from the 1910 Hayırsızada Incident to the present.

She lectured on the relationship between violence and politics, urban political ecology, destructed habitats, animal rights, infrastructure politics, urban public space design, everyday architecture, and urban design at the departments of Political Science and Urban Studies and the Parsons School of Design of the same university. She researched as an international fellow at the Goethe University Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Normative Orders.

Before joining the Kadir Has University Core Program, she worked as an expert researcher at the Istanbul Planning Agency (IPA) in the climate crisis, ecology, and environmental policies. Dr. Yıldırım continues her research on the climate crisis, ecological destruction, destructed habitats, wildlife, street animals, love for animals, altruism, politics of animal rights, relations of violence and care among socially and spatially excluded city-dwellers, insights for rights and justice, changes in settlement, subsistence and survival relationships in İstanbul.