Elif Irem Az is an 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. Her research interests lie at the intersections of disaster, extractivism, labor, disability/debility, and ecological unpredictability. Her book project (tentatively titled Mining Interruption: Life, Labor, and Coal after the Soma Mine Disaster) explores the afterlives of the Soma mine disaster of May 2014, which took the lives of 301 coal miners in Aegean Turkey. At CMES, she is working on a collaborative project on the February 6 twin earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria. Az is also developing a second individual project on deep sea mining and the material politics of future-making and uncertainty in this new frontier of extractive colonialism.