About

Serra Hakyemez is an Associate Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on law, psychoanalysis, decolonization, incarceration, counterinsurgency warfare, social movements, armed resistance, media studies, Kurdish freedom movement, Turkey, and the Southwest Asia and North African (SWANA) region. Her work explores the intersections of these areas within the context of sociocultural and political dynamics, contributing to understanding social and political struggles in these regions.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Geography
• Gender studies
• Law
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Until the war on terror is abolished …

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Green peppers, tomatoes, and lemons, disunite!”: Feminist solidarity in times of wars

  American Anthropologist · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  Abstract This article focuses on female bodies co‐laboring across the racial lines and academic‐activist divides to explore both the potentials and constraints of feminist solidarity in the hyper‐masculine and ultra‐nationalist normative order of the global war on terror. Anthropological studies have deconstructed phantasmatic narratives of the global war on terror by disclosing its racialized and classed structure. However, what remains understudied is how racialized female bodies are subjected to the biopower and necropower of this war. This ethnography concentrates on the feminist solidarity between Özlem Yasak and Serra Hakyemez, the coauthors of this article, which stretches over 13 years and moves between the colony and the metropole and the Global South and Global North. It examines how a Turkish academic and a Kurdish activist (both lower middle‐class women) forge, cultivate, and repair their comradeship as they move from an immigration office to their family house to neoliberal universities. Based on what we call the Other‐graphy as a new feminist method, this article argues that the global war on terror expands its reach as the humanitarian and neoliberal regimes of power recruit activists and academics to the fantasy of autonomous subjectivity posited against their possible political solidarity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Turkey: <i>Turkey and the Kurdish Peace Process: Actors, Issues, and Context</i> , by Arin Y. Savran (book reviews)

  The Middle East Journal · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Geography

  Turkey and the Kurdish Peace Process: Actors, Issues, and Context , by Arin Y. Savran. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 182 pages. $65 cloth, e-book.

  PublisherDOI

• FOUR / Neither Civilian nor Combatant: Weaponised Spaces and Spatialised Bodies in Cizre

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2019-10-20

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Neither Civilian nor Combatant: Weaponised Spaces and Spatialised Bodies in Cizre

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2019-11-01 · 15 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  What kind of work does the categorical distinction between combatant and civilian do in the interplay of the necropolitics and biopower of the Turkish state? This paper focuses on a time period (2015-2016) in the history of the Kurdish conflict when that distinction was no longer operable as the war tactics of the Kurdish movement shifted from guerrilla attacks of hit and run in the mountains to the self-defence of residents in urban centres. It reveals the limit of inciting compassion through the figure of civilian who is assumed to entertain a pre-political life that is directed towards mere survival. It also shows how the government reconstructs the dead bodies using forensics and technoscience in order to portray what is considered by Kurdish human rights organizations civilians as combatants exercising necroresistance. As long as the civilian-combatant distinction remains and serves as the only episteme of war to defend the right to life, the state is enabled to entertain not only the right to kill, but also to turn the dead into the perpetrators of their own killing. Finally, this paper argues that law and violence, on the one hand, and the right to life and the act of killing on the other, are not two polar opposites but are mutually constitutive of each other in the remaking of state sovereignty put in crisis by the Kurdish movement's self-defence practices.

  PublisherDOI

• Margins of the Archive: Torture, Heroism, and the Ordinary in Prison No. 5, Turkey

  Anthropological Quarterly · 2017-01-01 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article focuses on the court documents produced during the 1980 military court trials of Kurds charged with crimes against the Turkish state. Tracing the unauthorized movement of documents to a group of human rights advocates, Kurdish activists, and defense lawyers, it asks how an archive of criminal proceedings transformed into an alternative one bearing political aspirations of various kinds. Instead of reading the archive as a textual artifact whose hermeneutic interpretation is under the strict control of the sovereign, this piece approaches it within a framework of action and scrutinizes how the textual form and symbolic meaning of an archive was altered as Kurds defended themselves before the court, inscribed their own stories on the documents in prison, and circulated them outside for archiving. I argue that despite the kind of semantic violence inflicted by the 1980 coup d'état, the material remainders of that period disclose that Kurds stitched together their world by construing a language of struggle that promises another form of social existence in the here and now. Thus, the archive-in-making is an archive of not only state violence, but also of revolutionary struggle and aspirations for the ordinary. This article views such archiving practices as a form of making that is conducive to new entanglements of life, violence, and law.

  PublisherDOI

• Lives and Times of Militancy: Terrorism Trials, State Violence and Kurdish Political Prisoners in Post-1980 Turkey

  2016-10-04 · 4 citations

  dissertation1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The AKP’s engagement with Turkey’s past crimes: an analysis of PM Erdoğan’s “Dersim apology”

  Dialectical Anthropology · 2013-03-01 · 70 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Political Ecology of a Ramsar Site Conservation Failure: The Case of Burdur Lake, Turkey

  Environment and Planning C Government and Policy · 2009-07-20 · 28 citations

  articleCorresponding

  The Burdur Lake basin in Turkey's Mediterranean region has been facing severe environmental damage in the form of increased pollution and a decrease in water volume, despite its Ramsar status as a major wintering site for the endangered white-headed duck ( Oxyura leucocephala). In fact, after the basin was granted Ramsar status it was made the subject of a ‘hard-park’ conservation policy. This in practice disenfranchised and alienated local people but did not lead to the effective preservation of the basin. We aim to shed light on the political ecology of the ongoing degradation, which has layers at local, national, and international levels, by using both quantitative and qualitative methods (consisting of in-depth interviews, focus groups, and face-to-face, randomly selected interviews with 625 people). We specifically explore the possible reasons why local people by and large did not—despite their high level of environmental concern about the site—demand conservation policies or voluntarily take action to preserve their site. Acknowledging that the sources of the problem are multilayered in nature, thus requiring a multilevel solution, we then propose a governance modality tailored for the case at hand. Since many of the problems that Burdur Lake faces are not unique, it is hoped that the conducted analysis will be relevant to other similar sites.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Haydar Darıcı

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Ozlem Yasak

  Voice of America (United States)

  2 shared

• Begüm Özkaynak

  Boğaziçi University

  1 shared

• Fikret Adaman

  1 shared

• Bilgin Ayata

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• CLA Single Semester Leave, University of Minnesota, Spring 2…
• McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, 2024-2026
• ACLS/Mellon Fellowship, 2022-2023
• Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2021-2022
• ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2015 - 2016