The research team investigates the socioeconomic and political processes that shape contemporary urban environments, livelihoods, and governance.

Our interdisciplinary research engages with processes of capital accumulation and financialization, state restructuring and border formation, material destruction and dispossession, migration, and racialization, with an emphasis on how these dynamics transform cities and the lives of those inhabiting them. 

We advance ethnographic and historical methods, integrating critical perspectives from anthropology, political economy, and geography, to elucidate the complex relationships between global economic forces and local experiences of inequality, precarity, and resistance across diverse contexts – including Turkey, Austria, Georgia, Greece, Iraq, Romania, and the US. Our work aims to uncover how extractive geographies reconfigure urban spaces, infrastructures, labor and social relations contributing theoretically and empirically to ongoing debates on social and urban justice.

This website serves as a forum to showcase the publications and activities of our members, and foster international collaboration and exchange among scholars, students, researchers, activists, and the broader public interested in these issues.