Seda Saluk

Seda Saluk is a feminist anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and Middle East studies. Her research broadly focuses on the politics and ethics of medical technologies through the lenses of gender, race, and ethnicity.

Saluk is currently working on a book project titled Monitoring Reproduction: Surveillance, Labor, and Care in Turkey (under contract). The book examines the rise of reproductive surveillance in Turkey within the context of demographic anxieties over changing fertility patterns among Turkish and non-Turkish communities. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork on public health surveillance tools such as centralized databases, Monitoring Reproduction demonstrates how seemingly revolutionary technologies provide governing regimes with novel tools to extend control into people’s intimate lives. The book also shows how the social life mediated by these technologies creates strategic forms of care and solidarity among patients and care providers to negotiate disenfranchising social structures and political systems. While mainstream accounts of data technologies prioritize individualized notions of autonomy and privacy, Monitoring Reproduction focuses on collective forms of and responses to reproductive injustices.

Building on the theme of public health governance, Saluk is also developing a new research project titled Contesting Vaccines: Reproduction, Race, and Nation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and feminist cultural analysis, this project probes how the emerging parental distrust of childhood vaccinations in Turkey interacts with public anxieties around polio and measles outbreaks after the migrations from Syria. Contesting Vaccines explores how policymakers, health practitioners, and ordinary citizens use and contest gendered and ethnoracialized stereotypes to (de)legitimize different healing practices and how this (de)legitimization produces new regimes of governance in the Middle East. This interdisciplinary project draws upon feminist theory, medical anthropology, and critical refugee studies, and illuminates the ways in which debates around infectious diseases and vaccines are intimately tied to broader questions about gender, race, and nation.

Saluk’s research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and several fellowships from the University of Massachusetts and the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in journals including the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Women’s Studies International Forum, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Feminist Tahayyül, Collaborative Anthropologies, and Feminist Yaklaşımlar; edited volumes on reproduction and feminist movements; and online at Jadaliyya, 5Harfliler, and Çatlak Zemin. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. 

Saluk is also a feminist translator who has translated works between Turkish and English as part of the editorial collective of the journal Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaşımlar and in other publishing collectives. She was the translation co-editor of 'Namus': Suçlar, Paradigmalar ve Kadına Yönelik Şiddet (2014), the Turkish translation of Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain's anthology on "crimes of honor" in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Her most recent published translations have appeared in the edited collections Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey: Conversations on Democratic and Social Challenges (2019) and The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (2022).

Research Areas

Feminist studies of science, medicine, and technology; anthropology of reproduction and public health; postcolonial and transnational feminisms; Middle East studies

Affiliation(s)

• Center for Global Health Equity
• Center for Middle Eastern & North African Studies
• Digital Studies Institute
• Institute for Research on Women and Gender