Bürge Abiral is a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Anthropology and the Middle East Studies Center at the Ohio State University. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2023. She has a BA in Anthropology from Williams College (2011) and an MA in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University (2015). Her current research examines everyday forms of environmentalism in Turkey under conditions of economic precarity and political authoritarianism. By foregrounding the contemporary back-to-the-land movement within the emergence of alternative food networks, this project focuses on how middle-class urbanites engage in moral striving at individual and collective levels to create alternative agroecological futures. Abiral’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and the Council for European Studies. At Johns Hopkins University, Abiral held fellowships at the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, the Ecological Design Collective, and the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. 

Abiral has published writings on the memories of women dissidents during the 1980 military junta in Turkey, the radical aspirations of permaculture practitioners, the effects of COVID-19 on alternative food networks, and the unequal division of labor and essentialist views of womanhood within the sustainable food movement. For more information, please visit her Google Scholar and Academia pages.