Campus
- Scarborough (UTSC)
Fields of Study
- Social & Political Geography
Areas of Interest
Feminist geography, geographies of secularism and religion, geographies of Islam, creative geographies, security studies.
Biography
My research centers on the tension between religion, secularism and security through studies on political Islam and Islamophobia, and on Muslim cultural politics with a focus on cultural and creative industries. Feminist geography, geopolitics and transnational feminism are pivotal to these studies. Much of my work has had a regional focus on Turkey but she has drawn from cases from across the Middle East, Europe and North America. Currently I explore the cultural geographies of secularism and Islam in Turkey through a study of Islamic and traditional visual arts in Istanbul from the 1990s onwards. This research aims to unravel the cultural politics of Islam and its entanglement with neoliberalism as manifested in the emergence of this art scene that developed primarily through involvement of young pious women artists. Muslim and feminist geopolitics, urban and cultural geographies of Islam and critical approaches to cultural and creative industries in non-European contexts emerge as the leading themes in this research project. My previous research focused on the intertwinement of secularism and security through a study on the Turkish military’s security discourse from the 1980s to the end of the 2000s. I examined the construction of political Islam as a risk to national security as it shaped the experiences of women in military families I look forward to working with students primarily on project related to feminist and cultural geographies of secularism and religion.
Publications
2021 Arik, H. "Creative geographies of Islam: The case of Islamic and traditional visual arts scene in Istanbul" Cultural Geographies (Forthcoming)
2018 Arik, H. “Emotional and Corporeal Formations of Secularism: A Case Study of Military Bases in Turkey, 1980s-2000s” Social & Cultural Geography. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2018.1559344
2018 Arik, H. “Secular risk governance and the Turkish military’s battle with political Islam, 1980s-2000s”. Security Dialogue, 49 (4): 306–323. DOI: 10.1177/0967010618775021
2016 Arik, H. “Security, secularism and gender: the Turkish military's security discourse in relation to political Islam”, Gender, Place & Culture, 23 (5): 641-658. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2015.1034242