Başak Can
Başak Can is Associate Professor of Sociology at Koç University and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include medicine and political violence, gender and reproductive justice, and environmental health. She is the author of Forensic Fantasies: Doctors, Documents and the Limits of Truth in Turkey (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), and her articles have appeared in American Anthropologist, Medical Anthropology, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Her current research examines chronic illness and industrial pollution in a petrochemical town in Türkiye, asking how residents, clinicians, officials, and activists explain the causes of illness and what environmental health justice means in contexts where harm is layered and proof is difficult to establish.
1 article contributed
The smell arrived in the middle of our interview. I was sitting in the trade union’s local center in Aliağa, on İzmir’s northern edge, three days into a preliminary study of industrial pollution and health. İbrahim is a retired petrochemical operator, a two-term union branch chair, and now an opposition member of the municipal council. […]
