18 December 2020
Bilgin Ayata is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She obtained a PhD in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests are socio-political transformation processes with a focus on migration, protest movements, affect and emotions, transnationalism, memory and postcolonial interventions. Her current research projects investigate the EU´s »Migration management« in the Mediterranean as well as the concept of »affective citizenship«. In addition to her research and teaching activities, she has been a curator and organizer of political and decolonial interventions, e.g. the exhibition Manufacturing Race. Contemporary Memories of a building´s colonial past (2014); the public lecture series The Art of Intervention (2018) at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Basel or the recent exhibition Cok Basel: Transnational Memoryscapes Switzerland-Turkey (2019). She is directing the research project ‘Infrastructure Space and the Future of Migration Management: The Case of the EU Hotspots in the Mediterranean Borderscape.’
