Marie Curie Postdoctoral Grant, University of Vienna
2024–2027
Umut Kuruüzüm
Post-Doc
Supply Chains
War and Disaster Economies
Child Labour
Poverty Reduction
Development Economics
Connect:
umut.kuruuzum@univie.ac.atBio
Umut Kuruüzüm is an economic anthropologist, trained at the London School of Economics. His research examines supply chains in the Middle East, with particular focus on contexts of war, disaster, and markets of illegal and informal extraction. He investigates cases of child labour, bonded labour, debt bondage, hazardous working conditions, occupational diseases, as well as pollution and toxic exposures within these political and economic landscapes.
He is the author of Building from Scrap: War, Labour, and Recycling in Iraqi Kurdistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), an ethnography of industrial production within a war economy, based on long-term fieldwork (2014–2016) in a scrap-recycling steel mill operating along the border near the ISIS frontlines in Iraqi Kurdistan.
In 2021, he received the British Council COP26 Climate Change Grant for research on agro-plastic pollution. In 2024, he was awarded the Wenner-Gren Post-PhD Research Grant to investigate agro-plastic recycling and the labour of Syrian refugee workers in tent settlements along the Cilician coast of the northeastern Mediterranean. Since September 2024, he has been a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, where his work focuses on subcontracting and post-disaster reconstruction in the aftermath of the earthquake in southeastern Turkey in 2023.
In addition to his academic research, he has over a decade of professional experience in the development sector, including work with organisations, such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the World Bank, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), UNICEF, the U.S. Department of Labor, Turkish Ministry of Labour and Social Security, and the Anker Research Institute.
Fellowships, Grants, and Awards
Wenner-Gren Post-Doctoral Research Grant
2023–2024
British Council COP26 Climate Change Grant
2021–2022
Turkish Ministry of Education, PhD Grant
2013–2018
Publications
Publications
Books
Building From Scrap: War, Recycling, and Labour in Iraqi Kurdistan
Selected publications
- Forging fragility: Capitalogenic flows and landscapes in the Middle East - Special Issue
- Trapped Under the Orient’s Night: Blind-Sourced Child Labour in Contract Tobacco Farming - Journal Article
- Seeing Through One Health: The Disaster Economy of Recycling in Post-Earthquake Türkiye - Report
- From rubble to rebuilding: Recycling scrap metal on the Iraqi Kurdistan–ISIS war frontier - Journal Article
- A Plastic Root of Toxic Survival - Journal Article
- Effects of COVID-19 on Seasonal Migrant Agricultural Workers and Their Children - Report
- Impacts of the Earthquakes on Seasonal Migratory Agricultural Workers and Their Children - Report
- Reducing Waste Towards a Just Transition: Work, Labour, Value in Informal Recycling Chain - Report
- In the Web of Movements: Floating Industrial Labour between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan - Book Chapter
In: Industrial Labour in an Unequal World: Ethnographic Perspectives on Uneven and Combined Development, edited by Strümpell, C. & Hoffman, M.
- Alienated imagination through a mega development project in Turkey: The case of the Osman Gazi Bridge - Journal Article
Other Media
- Under the Cover of Night, Short Film, (~ 2 min)
The animation highlights the worst forms of child labour as recognized by the ILO, depicting children working at night in oriental tobacco fields in western Türkiye.
Talks and Events
Past
Matters of Risk: Infrastructures and Technologies of (In) Security and Polarization - Convenor
Jul 2026
Poznań, Poland
co-organised with Ebru Kayaalp, Tessa Diphoorn, Vidushi Kaushik
European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) 2026: Possibilities in a Polarised World
Workshop on (Un)Chaining Disasters: Materials, Work, and the Everyday of Re-Configuration - Organizer
Jun 2026
Kobe, Japan
The workshop invites case studies that examine supply chains, forms of work, and human experiences affected by disruptions such as wars and armed conflicts, industrial accidents, earthquakes, storms, wildfires, large-scale infrastructure failures, and other events involving material destruction and displacement.
Kobe University
Class at Work on the Seismic Line - Presenter
Apr 2026
American University of Cairo, Egypt
Co-authored with Ann-Christin Zuntz
Conference on Spectres of the Undercommon: Inhumanities in the Wake of the Catastrophe
American University of Cairo