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Mar 30, 2026

What Drives the Marginalized? Professor Alize Arican Explores the Question in American Anthropologist

By: Colin Powell School

Professor Alize Arican, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Department of AIP, published an article, entitled “Cultivating Potentialities: Future-Making and Its Conditions in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul” in American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. 

Based on her ongoing book project, this article asks: What propels marginalized people like Mustafa Abi — a Kurdish resident and shopkeeper in Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı neighborhood who opened his shop next to a state-led urban transformation project that seeks to displace him and his neighbors — to stay with future possibilities in places that threaten to displace them? The answer lies, Arican argues, in what she calls “cultivating potentialities”: future-making, not despite, but through indeterminacy, steeped in structural inequalities. 

Read the full study here.