Pembroke Center

Ph.D. Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2024

Dissertation: “The Sea is Not Empty: Maritime Trade Ecologies in the Eastern Mediterranean”

Eda Tarak studies the travels of cargo ships in the Eastern Mediterranean along with the landscape/seascape transformations and economic-political shifts in the industrial coastal towns. Eda’s research brings together environmental anthropology, multispecies ethnography, and feminist economic anthropology with a focus on experimental ethnographic methods. Her current book project centers coastal industrial processes of chemical seepages and looks for ways to represent these fluid events in experimental uses of text that disrupt the linear flow of text, such as drawings, diagrams, and lines that can foreground continuities and blockages. On the intersection of experimental ethnographic methods, abrupt environmental shifts, and coastal industrial development in Turkey and in the Eastern Mediterranean, this book will search for ways to attend to landscape patterns, blockages, flows and overflows that signal the movement of waste and toxicity in the mixes of soil, sediment and water.

In 2024, Eda Tarak is teaching the GNSS course, “Wet Ethnographies” which will examine experimental ethnographic methods and ethnographies that take place in environments where the boundaries between water and land get blurred in deltas, river embankments, swamps, mangroves, floods, and reclamation areas that carry signs of former and continuing colonial projects of the empire or capital. The course will center “wetness” as a theoretical tool for understanding fluidity, circulation, and flow to challenge projects of linear development that strive to solidify and fix the movement of water, soil, sediments, and living beings. In its commitment to fluidity, the course will introduce ethnographic works that bend the forms of knowledge and ways of knowing by using poetry, drawings, and diagrams.

She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2024, her BA in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University in 2011 with a minor in Art Theory and Criticism and MA in Sociology from Bogazici University in Istanbul with a thesis on historical and political encounters of displacement, inequality, and exclusion.