Onur Günay is an anthropologist and documentary film-maker. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School. Onur's current research is an anthropological study of the processes by which displaced Kurdish migrants become urban laborers in Istanbul, exploring how ethnic and cultural differences are recast through labor, as these differences mark migrant Kurdish men’s bodies, sexualities, life prospects, and senses of belonging in the city. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the interstices of a fragile peace process and war between the Turkish state and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), his writing foregrounds how Kurdish migrant workers articulate their ethical and political understandings of self, community, and rights in relation to their struggles for economic survival and social mobility—all this in the context of dramatic economic restructuring and the rise of political Islam in Turkey. Onur wrote extensively on political violence, ethnicity, collective memory, nation-state and sovereignty, and edited books and journal issues in Turkish on these issues. Onur’s work as a filmmaker is integral to his work as anthropologist and storyteller of the lives of his interlocutors. His last documentary, Garod [Longing], made with ethnomusicologist Burcu Yildiz, portrays the lives and the musical stories of two Armenian American musicians using their trip to the family’s lost hometown of Diyarbak?r as the central narrative arc. Garod focuses on the remaking of a musical tradition and explores the ways in which the Armenian community in the United States coped with pain and loss through music and art. His fields of research and teaching include migration, labor, ethnicity and violence, political economy, subject formation and agency, ethics, critical and social theory, ethnographic filmmaking, political Islam, and the Middle East. He holds a PhD (2017) and an MA (2013) in Anthropology from Princeton University, and an MA in Sociology from Bogazici University. In 2017-2018, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University Mahindra Humanities Center.

Anthropology

Kurdish Studies

Ethnography

Urban Studies

Political Economy

State Formation

Theory

Turkey

Kurdistan

Displacement, Violence, Ethnicity, Labor, Gender,

Turkish (native)

Kurdish (intermediate)

Spanish (intermediate)