Elif Irem Az

Elif Irem Az is a medical and political-economic anthropologist, poet, and Disaster Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University in 2023.

Seeking to present a corporeal history of contemporary capitalism, Az's research lies at the intersection of disability/debility, medical disability assessment, labor, resource extraction, and temporality in mining and disaster contexts. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research in the Soma Coal Basin of Turkey, Az's in-progress book manuscript, "Life and Limb: Disability, Labor, and Extraction in Soma," explores the corporeal, medical, and political-economic afterlives of the Soma mine disaster of May 2014, which resulted in the deaths of 301 coal miners.

At CMES, Az is also working on an oral history and ethnographic project on the February 6 twin earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria. Since February 2024, she has been conducting fieldwork and oral history interviews in the Antakya/Antioch province of the Levant, primarily with survivors who are disabled and/or diagnosed with chronic illnesses as a result of the 2023 earthquakes.