Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies
she/her
About
Seda Saluk is a feminist anthropologist whose research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and Middle East studies. Her work critically examines the politics and ethics of medical technologies through the lenses of gender, race, and ethnicity.
Her current book project, Monitoring Reproduction: Surveillance, Labor, and Care in Turkey (under contract with Stanford University Press), explores the rise of reproductive surveillance in Turkey in 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, the book reconceptualizes surveillance not as an all-encompassing and totalizing power but as a partial and stratified mechanism of reproductive governance. By analyzing disruptions to people’s reproductive lives that do not make it into the database, such as labor precarity, domestic abuse, and state violence, Monitoring Reproduction argues that surveillance operates not through what is monitored but through what is omitted and rendered invisible.
Saluk is also developing a new research project, Contesting Vaccines: Reproduction, Race, and Nation, which investigates how the emerging parental distrust of childhood vaccinations in Turkey interacts with public anxieties around polio and measles outbreaks after the migrations from Syria. The project examines how gendered and ethnoracialized stereotypes are mobilized to legitimize or challenge different healing practices, and how these dynamics shape evolving regimes of governance in the region. This interdisciplinary project draws on feminist theory, medical anthropology, and critical refugee studies, illuminating how debates around infectious diseases and vaccines are closely linked to broader questions of gender, race, and nation.
Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and 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 holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
In addition to her academic work, Saluk is a feminist translator working between Turkish and English. She co-edited 'Namus': Suçlar, Paradigmalar ve Kadına Yönelik Şiddet (2014), the Turkish translation of Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain's anthology on "crimes of honor." Her recent translations have appeared in Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaşımlar (2024), The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics (2022), and Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey (2019)
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
- Science, Technology, and Society Program
