Faculty Profiles

Tarık Nejat Dinç is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the intersection of environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and resource geography. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2022. Nejat has research expertise in rural environmental justice movements, technopolitics of risk, and materialities of mining and toxicity, with a regional focus on Turkey, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. His current book project, Incomplete: Risk Topographies and Conflict Landscapes in the Age of the New Gold Rush, traces the main contours of extractive violence and conflicts in the current mineral age by exploring the making of Turkey’s first modern gold mine in Bergama, a primarily cotton and olive farming town in the Aegean region. A selection of this work, “Assembling Gold, Manufacturing Risk: Technopolitics in the Age of the Third Gold Rush,” is forthcoming in the edited volume Material Politics in Turkey: Infrastructure, Science, and Expertise. Before joining Reed, he taught at Stanford University and Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul. Nejat is a scholar-activist and worked as a food and agriculture campaigner for Greenpeace and as Program Coordinator of the Farmers’ Union of Turkey, a member of the global peasant movement La Via Campesina, prior to completing his Ph.D. His new research project critically examines the emerging conjuncture of climate change mitigation and biomining,  a novel extractivist practice whereby acid-secreting synthetic microorganisms become significant mining actors to meet the mineral needs of lithium batteries - the critical infrastructure of “energy transition.”