School of Humanities and Sciences
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Miray Cakiroglu
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2018
BioMiray Cakiroglu is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. She is currently conducting fieldwork on non-Muslim property in Turkey, with particular attention to the current figurations of the temporality of transition from the empire to the nation-state and the more-than-legal sociopolitical domain that infiltrates past and present articulations of ownership. Miray has focused on the scene of acquisition, use, confiscation, claim, and return involving non-Muslim property, specifically those owned by Rum foundations in contemporary Istanbul. Following the major earthquakes of 2023 in southern Turkey, Miray has extended her focus to understanding how property relations might be articulated in stark ways with loss, especially for the Arabic-speaking Christian Orthodox community in the Antakya region.
Miray has two poetry books published in Turkey. She also translated Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings into Turkish. Most recently, she collaborated with ten other women poets in a volume of documentary poetry.
Miray holds an M.A. degree in Near Eastern Studies from the Hagop Kevorkian Center at New York University and Critical and Cultural Studies from Bogazici University, Turkey. She received her B.A. from Bogazici University, Department of Western Languages and Literatures, with a double major in Philosophy. -
Hector Miguel Callejas
Lecturer
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsINDIGENIZING INDIANS:
RACE, CLASS, ETHNICITY, AND NATION IN EL SALVADOR
Indigenous movements produce and circulate discourses of Indigenous “ethnicities” and “nations” worldwide. This book examines how the discourses intersected with the racial and class status of “Indian” in El Salvador during the 2010s. It draws on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the capital city of San Salvador and the municipalities of Izalco and Nahuizalco in the western highlands (2019-2020). The book traces discourses and practices of Indigenous subject formation between state, Indigenous, international, and other actors during the national FMLN and Bukele governments. It shows how the actors created “Indigenous peoples” as a subject of governance that maintained Indian subordination within the national racialized class structure. In doing so, the book foregrounds the limits of ethnic and national discourses of Indigeneity for transforming the structural articulation of race and class in postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. It broadens scholarship on why Indigenous movements fail to decolonize states and societies.
During the 2010s, the Salvadoran Indigenous movement led state institutions to establish a national multicultural regime focused on Indigenous ethnodevelopment and poverty alleviation for “poor Indians” in the mestizo Salvadoran nation. An activist network created Indigenous ethnicity and nationhood and lobbied state authorities to reverse two historical processes maintaining Indian poverty—landlessness and political exclusion—to little effect. The state production of Náhuat Pipil people and culture for Indigenous heritage tourism development in Izalco and Nahuizalco expanded state power and reinforced racialized class relations among municipal community members.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ACTIVISM IN CALIFORNIA
The Sacramento Valley of California is home to federally recognized California Indian tribes and a large migrant population from Latin America, including Indigenous migrants. Over the past decade, state institutions, non-profit organizations, tribal governments, and other actors have transformed "environmental justice" into an important discourse for policymaking and activism. Hector is interested in understanding how actors use the discourse and reshape the intersections of race, Indigeneity, and colonialism in the region. He has entered the field and begun preliminary fieldwork through his parents' participation as faith-based Latinx community leaders in the Sacramento Environmental Justice Coalition, a grassroots organization. Hector and his family have lived and worked in an "Environmental Justice community" as defined by Sacramento County's Office of Planning & Environmental Review.
