Education:
Ph.D. 2023 University of Arizona
M.A. 2014 Sabancı University
M.A. 2011 Boğaziçi University
B.A. 2008 Boğaziçi University
Areas of Research/Interest:
Language and environmental politics; language ideologies; language activism; language loss; language reclamation; environmental justice; anthropology of environmentalism; multilingualisms; language, ethnicity, and race; multispecies ethnography; language documentation, Middle East, Hemshins, Turkey
Background:
Dr. Kaya Özkan is a linguistic anthropologist who works primarily among Turkey’s Hemshins, an ethnic minority group who speak an endangered Armenian language. Her research is focused on the intersections of language and the environment, with particular attention to their roles in structuring inequalities, and re-making of politics and subjectivities. Her work combines linguistic anthropological approaches to language loss and reclamation through language ideologies with foundational and current approaches in the anthropology of environmentalism and posthumanist approaches to language and the environment in order to explore how Hemshin people in Turkey cope with the intertwined processes of socio-linguistic and environmental changes on their lands.
Title: Assistant Professor
Department: Department of Anthropology
Email address: Email me
Phone: (828) 262-2268
Fax: (828) 262-2982