Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Dr Deniz Yonucu

Lecturer in Sociology of Crime

Background

Deniz Yonucu received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Cornell University. Her background is in anthropology and sociology and her teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of anthropology, law and society studies, and urban studies. More specifically, she focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, the criminalization of working-class youth, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, coloniality, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus.

Dr. Yonucu is Directions Section co-editor of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR)  and co-founder and co-convenor of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).

Dr Yonucu is a host on New Books Network's Policing, Incarceration and Reform podcast where she interviews authors on topics related to policing, surveillance, carcerality, and securitisation.

Her recent work appeared or is forthcoming in Current Anthropology, IJURR, Social and Legal Studies, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and Critical Times.

Dr Yonucu has also published various op-ed articles related to her area of research on openDemocracy, Jadaliyya, PoLAR Forum, and beyond.

To hear and learn about her book, visit here and here.

Before joining Newcastle University, she worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and held postdoctoral positions at the Center for Technology and Society at the Technical University of Berlin, the Zentrum Moderner Orient, and the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. 

She welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in conducting research in any of the areas of her research interest.

QUALIFICATIONS

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Ph.D. in Anthropology.               


2014

University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. M.A. in Social Sciences.

2006

Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. M.A. in Sociology

2005

Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul. B.A. in Sociology (Ranking the 1st).

2002

Recent Publications

Yonucu, Deniz. 2022. Counterinsurgency And Insurgent Safety in Istanbul. Urban History Blog.

Yonucu, Deniz. 2022.  Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul. Cornell University Press. 

Yonucu, Deniz. (Forthcoming). "Inspirational Hauntings and a Fearless Spirit of Resistance: Negotiating the Undercover Police Surveillance of Racialized Spaces in Istanbul" Current Anthropology.

 Yonucu, Deniz. 2021.  "Counterinsurgency in Istanbul: provocative counterorganization, violent interpellation and sectarian fears." British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies  1-19.

 Yonucu, Deniz, and Talin Suciyan. 2020.  "From the Ottoman Empire to Post-1923: The Catastrophe as Seen by the Angel of History." Critical Times 3.2: 300-311.

 Yonucu, Deniz.  2018. "Urban vigilantism: A study of the anti-terror law, politics and policing in Istanbul." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42.3: 408-422.

 Yonucu, Deniz. 2018. "The absent present law: An ethnographic study of legal violence in Turkey." Social & Legal Studies 27.6: 716-733.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Research

I have been working on the policing and criminalization of Turkey’s dissident and racialized Alevi and Kurdish working-class youth for more than ten years. In my book, Police, Provocation, Politics, situating Turkish policing within a global context and combining archival work and oral history narratives with ethnographic research, I demonstrate how Cold War and decolonial era counterinsurgency strategies continue to inform contemporary urban policing in Istanbul. Shedding light on counterinsurgency's affect-and-emotion generating divisive techniques and urban dimensions, I show how counterinsurgent policing strategies work to intervene in the organization of political dissent in a way that both counters existing alignments among dissident populations and prevents those that are emergent. I suggest that provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents and their containment in the places of racialized and dissident populations cannot be considered disruptions of political order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations. 

My research was funded by various institutions including the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the British Council’s Newton Fund, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Einstein Foundation, SALT Research, and the DAAD.

My new research project focuses on carceral expansion and the emerging technologies of surveillance and social control. I ask:

How do the ever-increasing digitalization, surveillance, and electronic monitoring systems contribute to carceral expansion?

What do the emerging forms of confinement and surveillance tell us about the spatio-temporal expansion of policing?

What are the broader social and cultural consequences of carceral expansion and “punitive surveillance” (Weisburd 2021)?

How do new forms of confinement inform and transform the spaces and practices of dissent?


 

Teaching

Both my research and teaching are guided by my commitment to interdisciplinary and decolonial approaches to pressing social issues. My teaching philosophy is based on the development of critical thinking skills and helping students hone their ability to denaturalize social relations through explorations of the structures and patterns that have shaped our historical present.


Before joining Newcastle University, I taught in various universities including the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Free University of Berlin, Cornell University, and Bosphorus University.


I am the module leader of  Investigating Inequalities and Crime (SOC1034) and Critical Approaches to Policing and Security (SOC 3047).


 


Publications