Yalçın Özkan

Dickinson College, Sociology, Faculty Member

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I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dickinson College. Before this appointment, I was a faculty member at Reed College from 2020 to 2024. I received my PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in May 2020.

A qualitative sociologist, my research specializes in law and society, economic sociology, culture, and practice theory with an empirical focus on contemporary Turkey.

My book manuscript, The Politics of Redress in Turkey: Work-Related Deaths, Monetized Restitution, and Struggles for Justice, is concerned with the striking frequency of workplace fatalities in Turkey and addresses the law’s part in this regime of normalized hazard. My account enriches our understanding of the tension between monetary compensation and justice, acquiescence and resistance in the face of inequality, and the capacity of the disadvantaged to make claims regarding justice through the criminal court.

My earlier works appear in Law & Social Inquiry and Qualitative Sociology. I am also a co-editor of Trajectories of Female Employment in the Mediterranean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) with Ayşe Buğra.

I teach Introduction to Sociology, Law & Society, Power & Resistance, Sociology of Money, and Culture & Inequality at Dickinson.

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Peer-Reviewed Journal Article by Yalçın Özkan

Money As Justice: Work-Related Deaths, Victim Workers’ Families, and Injustice in Turkey

Law and Social Inquiry

In the event of a work-related death, Turkish law directs the victim’s family to see the death as... more In the event of a work-related death, Turkish law directs the victim’s family to see the death as accidental and understand monetary compensation as a primary vehicle for justice. Based on interview data from a group of victims’ survivors, I examine how the bereaved make sense of accepting money for their losses. Despite the compliance of these families with monetized justice, the interviews suggest that they also have resentments against it. I show that pressing economic needs, a sense of disenfranchisement, and the limited nature of legal counsel lead the survivors to suppress their frustrations. In turn, many come to narrow their expectations of justice to getting what they think of as a fair sum of money. This situated framework, I argue, works to trivialize concerns about workplace safety. Insofar as the families see monetary compensation through a frame of justice, structural factors behind their losses remain unaddressed. Viviana Zelizer has long treated money as being grounded in meanings and moralities. In the tradition of legal consciousness literature, this article extends Zelizer’s fundamental approach by providing a framework to address how the moral underpinning of money can emerge from and reinforce power imbalances and systemic bias in the legal system.

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Bringing “a Different Femininity:” Immigrant Women from Bulgaria and Local Co-Workers on a Factory Floor in Turkey

Qualitative Sociology

This article draws on life-course interviews with a group of Turkish immigrant women from sociali... more This article draws on life-course interviews with a group of Turkish immigrant women from socialist Bulgaria and locals who shared the same factory floor for approximately two decades starting from the late 1970s in the city of Bursa, Turkey. It examines the relational processes that simultaneously shaped both the immigrant and local gendered understandings of employment. The contrasting norms that immigrant women and local co-workers attributed to work evolved into everyday contestations on the factory floor. Through these interactions, the work-oriented image of women embodied by immigrants placed pressure on understandings held by co-workers, specifically regarding women’s paid labor as secondary to men’s. However, the immigrants could not entirely change institutionalized gender expectations, and therefore simultaneously reworked their public conceptions of work to better accommodate their new situations. The findings contribute to the literature on gender and immigration by showing that immigrants selectively adopt gender norms present in their new destinations and, distinctively, that immigrants may simultaneously shape receiving gender contexts.

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Edited Volume by Yalçın Özkan

Trajectories of Female Employment in the Mediterranean (with Ayşe Buğra)

This book presents a comparative historical overview of female employment patterns across the Med... more This book presents a comparative historical overview of female employment patterns across the Mediterranean region, analyzing how the relationship between economic development, political change and the cultural environment shapes the evolution of gender roles in interconnected spheres of social life.

Other Publications by Yalçın Özkan

İş Kaynaklı Ölümleri Tazmin Etmek: Adaletin Sağlanmasında Parasal Zarar Gideriminin Olanak ve Sınırları

Teaching Documents by Yalçın Özkan

Sociology of Money (Syllabus)

Is money a self-propelling medium of exchange, solely about mundane financial calculations, trans... more Is money a self-propelling medium of exchange, solely about mundane financial calculations, transactions, and interests? Do we only use it to quantify various qualities into a standard metric to exchange them? What happens when money penetrates what is typically considered priceless, such as our norms, emotions, intimate relations, bodies, or nature? In today's world, it is common for various economic, legal, and social institutions to place financial values on things as profound as human life, death, blood, organs, justice, sexual or romantic partnerships, and wildlife. Does this exercise flatten, commodify, corrode, and corrupt, as many scholars, legalists, activists think it does? Or, does it operate interdependently with our moral principles, cultural practices, interpersonal relationships? Then, how can those supposed corrosive commodification practices, in reality, turn into meaningful relations within which our lives, values, and ties are construed, maintained, and shaped? This conference invites its participants to grapple with these fundamental problems and more. Drawing on neoclassical economic theory to its Marxist critics, critical socio-legal scholarship to moral philosophy, cultural studies to economic sociology, we'll delve deep into the social life of money. Thus, we'll examine money not merely as a financial instrument but with the social and cultural processes mediating its significance from within.

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Law and Society (Syllabus)

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Power & Resistance (Syllabus)

* For office hours, please make an appointment via the link above (see Office Hours). This is imp... more * For office hours, please make an appointment via the link above (see Office Hours). This is important to prevent scheduling conflict. If you need more than 15 minutes, feel free to choose two slots. Overview This course invites its participants to treat politics as grounded in everyday life, as arising from structure and agency, and as a medium of domination and change. It introduces some of the key scholarly debates over relations of power. As Karl Marx famously suggests, individuals generate their thinking and acting not as they please but under the restrictions of those broader structural contexts and power imbalances. These social forces, however, do not divest individuals from becoming active agents. People almost always have the capacity to resist and change. When, why, and how they realize that potential is a central concern of this class. It also asserts that why people are resigned to and how they participate in their own domination are equally crucial. Thus, this course calls as much attention to those individual and collective forms of resistance as it does to their absence. Learning Outcomes After the successful completion of this class, students will be able to: • Develop a comprehensive understanding of fundamental sociological theories about power relations and apply various paradigms to concrete cases. • Locate politics in everyday life, including environment, street, language, relationships, body, family, gender, race, and so forth. • Grasp the importance of power structures (e.g., the state, the law) and class, gender, and racial inequalities in the constitution of the political. • Advance critical perspectives on and arguments about the historical, cultural, and institutional contexts within which power is constituted, distributed, and contested. • Improve their analytical thinking and writing to evaluate, bridge, and expand upon theoretical and empirical studies of power, politics, and resistance. Requirements, Expectations, Policies 1. Preparation and Reading: This class is a reading-intensive conference. A careful and close engagement with the assigned texts is a necessary condition for your success.

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Money As Justice: Work-Related Deaths, Victim Workers’ Families, and Injustice in Turkey

Law and Social Inquiry

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Bringing “a Different Femininity:” Immigrant Women from Bulgaria and Local Co-Workers on a Factory Floor in Turkey

Qualitative Sociology

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Trajectories of Female Employment in the Mediterranean (with Ayşe Buğra)