I am a sociologist working on power, injustice, violence, crime, and moral governance. My research examines how societies and states legitimise collective harm, repress social dissent, and negotiate dignity in the aftermath of injustice. Across my work, I develop concepts that link historical rupture, moral discourse, and lived experience, enabling systematic comparison across regions, regimes, and time periods.

Trained across Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, I adopt a comparative historical sociological approach that places historical and contemporary cases in sustained scholarly conversation. My research projects analyse how violence, conflict, crime, and injustice are produced, justified, and contested, and how oppression becomes operative through institutions, discourse, and affective regimes. At the same time, I attend closely to locally situated experiences of suffering, resilience, social transformation, and resistance.

I approach my work as a social and cultural critic, and I am attentive to how power is embedded in moral vocabularies, political institutions, social structures, and everyday life. I am interested in exploring how macro power structures shape micro lived experience. My research investigates the persistence of social harm over time and the ways in which individuals and communities navigate these circumstances in their pursuit of dignity, belonging, and recognition. My research projects contribute primarily to sociological theory and comparative historical sociology by expanding their empirical scope and linking local histories to global structures of power and injustice.

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Methodologically, my research combines advanced qualitative analysis with sustained ethnographic engagement and longitudinal fieldwork. I work with complex qualitative data drawn from in-depth and evolving interview techniques, visual methods, archival research, and multi-sited ethnography, tracing social processes over time. I also employ specialised qualitative-data analysis software (QDA Miner and NVivo) to manage and explore large qualitative datasets to move between fine-grained interpretation and broader comparative patterns. This methodological pluralism enables me to have rigorous empirical grounding while supporting theoretically ambitious, cross-regional, and cross-temporal analysis.

I have secured approximately £2.9 million in competitive research funding as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator from organisations including the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, AHRC, the European Council, and the Max Planck Institute.

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Alongside my research, I am committed to supporting LGBTQI+ scholars in academia. As a gay man, I am acutely aware of the importance of visible role models within our community, particularly considering the absence of these for many scholars during their training. I am active in the ISA’s LGBTQA Caucus and collaborate with colleagues to develop structured mentorship initiatives for early-career LGBTQI+ researchers. I also offer voluntary mentorship to PhD candidates and postdoctoral fellows from the queer community.