Seçil Daǧtaș is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo. She obtained her PhD in 2014 from the Department of Anthropology and the Collaborative Program in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2017-2018, she held a residential fellowship at the Collegium de Lyon and participated in the UNESCO Chair program on “Memory, Cultures and Interculturality” at Lyon Catholic University. A political anthropologist, Seçil Daǧtaș specializes in the gender politics and secular governance of religious diversity, minority and refugee displacement, religious nationalisms, and the political potential of everyday sociality at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. Her current work examines the intersections of religion and gender in shaping border politics in Turkey, and probes the political possibilities and limits of solidarity as the condition of urban cohabitation between a diverse group of displaced Syrians and Turkish citizens. She is particularly interested in how gendered social spaces along the Turkish-Syrian border call into question humanitarian and state-centered approaches to refugee resettlement, and expand our understandings of what constitutes politics beyond formal political institutions and mechanisms.

At UW, Seçil Daǧtaș teaches courses on the anthropology of gender, anthropology of religion, Muslim lives and practices, and the relationship between state borders and sociocultural boundaries. She supervises graduate work in the areas of nationalism, secularism, border politics, everyday Islam, and the cultural politics of displacement.