Ayşe Çağlar on migration, displacement, and urban transformation, feat. Ana Ćuković

Ayşe Çağlar shares how her experiences growing up in Turkey and living in multiple countries shaped her approach to using migrants as an entry point to explore how societies define themselves, draw boundaries, and govern communities. She is joined by Ana Ćuković, whose research looks at how displacement unfolds in cities, including Detroit through urban planning and policy, and how historical and economic contexts shape who is included or pushed out of cities.

Guests: Ayşe Çağlar, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna; Ana Ćuković, Philanthropy Fellow, Council of Michigan Foundations and Hudson-Webber Foundation.

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Transcript

Maggie Perzyna  

Welcome to Borders & Belonging, the podcast that explores migration through bold research, new ideas and stories that connect those findings to the real world. This season, we're talking with migration scholars whose ideas have left a lasting mark on the field. Then we dig deeper to uncover the paths that brought them here, the turning points, lived experiences and insights that shape the theories redefining how we understand mobility, borders and belonging. Each scholar has been asked to nominate an up-and-coming researcher whose work they admire. In the chat, established voices and emerging thinkers come together in conversation to explore the connective tissue between the past, present, and future of migration studies. From the personal to the political, from theory to practice, these conversations uncover not just what our guests study, but how their lives and work have helped shape the field and where they see it heading next. Today, our conversation centers on Ayşe Çağlar, a leading migration scholar whose work has reshaped how we understand cities, displacement, and the power dynamics that shape belonging. Before Ayşe became a well-known voice in anthropology and migration studies, she was a teenager in Turkey trying to figure out what she wanted to be. But the environment around her made that kind of self-discovery complicated and sometimes even risky.

Ayşe Çağlar  

I grew up in Turkey at a period where the political divisions and polarization, it was very, very strong, and it was a question of life and death. Many of my entry points to literature to interests and social life, even as a teenager, that was shaped with that political climate, and I think it left an impact on what I did. On the other hand, I was very much interested in literature, arts, music. The political climate was not very friendly for that. It was always that you had to read certain things, you had to listen this kind of music, and that made me very uneasy, but still, that was a very rewarding experience.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ayşe ultimately created her own path, despite growing up in a culture attempting to steer her in a specific direction.

Ayşe Çağlar  

I was always described as a very stubborn child who pursued whatever I had in mind, and I was not a easy child. I think not that because I was naughty, but I followed strange ideas. I think I learned to be much more open to different perspectives. Maybe because of those formative teenager years.

Maggie Perzyna  

These ideas blossomed and eventually helped define what Ayşe values the most as an adult.

Ayşe Çağlar  

Good literature, it gets you so excited. Many of the scholarly books make you think about life, but also music. I don't think that I would ever give up being interested in different kinds of food. I can't remove neither literature, nor music, nor food from my life. I always hated that the migrants from the same place, they always complained about food, and I found it so rewarding that a new place had different kinds of new food. And I was there to explore.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ayşe moved to Canada to study at McGill University, where she later earned her master's and PhD. She recalls being surprised by the transition to Canadian culture.

Ayşe Çağlar  

When I came to Canada, I was very surprised to find the other students not being so much engulfed into politics, and I started appreciating that, that is, they had different kind of issues, but this is the kind of the atmosphere I was coming from. At one point, very politicized. On the other hand, I found it important, and then it always gave me an entry point, an access in whatever I do and whatever questions I asked.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ayşe often shares this piece of advice, "live in a place as if you'll never leave, even if you eventually do." With a career that's taken her around the world, she reflects on what's inspired that belief and when it first began to guide her.

Ayşe Çağlar  

I could not tell you when I adopted that mindset but being in a new place always gave me a feeling of freedom, not knowing to people was also nice. I try to live as if I would be living there. Here I am. I will make the best out of it. If you try to find things to complain, there is no shortage. But that was not my mindset, and I was always bothered by the people who did so. If you have changed and moved places so many times, it becomes a kind of a socializing aspect, complaining about this food, complaining about this attitude. I don't think that I had that mindset, and I think I benefited from that.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ayşe hopes that when people look back on her career, they'll see someone who stayed true to herself. After growing up being told what she could and couldn't be curious about, she wants anyone she's crossed paths with to never take their own curiosity for granted.

Ayşe Çağlar  

I was always honest in my arguments and critiques and positions. I always stood behind my positions. I might have changed them later and then made it clear, but I think I would like to be remembered by my peers, that this is a person who spoke her mind and never performative questions and real curiosity. I think this openness and curiosity enabled me to learn a lot from my peers, but also from my students. You could also say that to the students too, I never lost my curiosity in their thinking. Why do they ask the question that they are asking and try to find out and follow that up.

Maggie Perzyna  

Now that we've heard Ayşe's story, we're turning to discuss what displacement really means today. Joining her is Ana Ćuković, a philanthropy fellow with the Council of Michigan Foundations and Hudson Webber Foundation. She's a rising scholar whose research explores how displacement unfolds through urban planning and policy. She looks at why some people choose not to migrate at all, even when it might seem like the obvious path forward. Together, they take us inside the everyday realities of displacement and ask what we learn when we stop treating migrants as a category and start listening to how they live, move, stay, and reshape the city. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Ayşe Çağlar  

Thanks for having us. Hi.

Ana Ćuković  

Hello. 

Maggie Perzyna  

So, Ayşe you've said you didn't start out thinking of yourself as a migration scholar. What drew you in, and how did that shift happen for you?

Ayşe Çağlar  

Yes, it's true. I did not start as a migration scholar. And in fact, I've never seen myself as a migration scholar until now. And it's ironic because I have worked on migrants and cities for a very long time. But for me, I think the object of the study was not migrants and migration. Rather, I used migrants as an entry point. The focus on migrants as an entry point to address the way the societies define themselves, draw their boundaries, narrate who are the members of their community and how they are governed. This is a slightly different take, I think, than we have in most of the migration scholarship, or the people that would define themselves as migration scholars, that they pose deal with the challenges, in fact, the problems those who are identified as migrants pose to the societies and try to produce solutions to these such as integration. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I was neither interested in the challenges, nor, ironically, the benefits of migrants and migration per se. So, I have been more interested, as I said, using migrants as a lens to learn about the social, economic and political dynamics of societies, their power structures, and particularly where these structures break down and open cracks. Migrants as a category referring to who is in but not of the places, could serve as a prism to understand those cracks of in the power structures and the self-narratives of societies, even for the question of how could we live together, which I think is an important question. The end, the question was not necessarily a question of, how could we live together with migrants, although I agree the other latter provides a very good way, and I think my biography played an important role in the way I focused on migrants. I lived in so many different places, worked and studied, and they have exposed me to different repertoires, canons, tropes and political narratives and scholarship about the migrants, but they enabled me to observe the variations in the presence of these identity groups of people that identified as migrants in the economy politics, but also in the imaginaries of these cities. So, as a newcomer to many places, I was not identified as a migrant in all of them, I kept being in and out of the category of the migrant without any changes in my legal status or my citizenship change. This did not have much impact on the way my movements were seen and understood by the others, and including the migration scholars. I will put them there too. This enabled me, I think, to observe the variations in different sets of constraints, opportunities that the newcomers are faced in situating themselves in urban life and politics and these experiences, I think, urged me to seek an analytical language to capture how place and space mattered in the migrant emplacement beyond the nation state. And this was a desire to capture the dynamics behind the convergence and divergence of those processes shaping migrant lives subjectivities, but also urban justice and politics. These were the start, I mean this I was all the time trying to find an analytical language, and together with my long-term colleague and co-author, Nina Glick-Schiller, this was our first initial introduction. But the ground for that was my personal experiences. I saw also the worth and the worthlessness of the same group of categories of migrants for the cities were also a variable in time. So, I was trying to find how to capture those temporal and spatial variations. And most importantly, I said that I was more interested in terms of understanding broader transformations in those in the societies. So, I used them, I listened to migrants, and I studied them to understand how they were embedded in the broader structures and their transformations. My concern was not really about the production of migration, but about the broader conditions of this production, and what this production could tell us about the global structures of political economy, and it's shifting regimes of value.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ana, you also study urban change. How did you come into this work, and what questions keep you coming back?

Ana Ćuković

So, just a little bit of a background. We migrated, you know, with my family, to the United States and to Detroit in the late 90s. I have been living here, you know, throughout high school. Detroit in the early 20th century, and for the better half of the 20th century, was an industrial giant, at some point, being at the top of the United States cities, in terms of, you know, economic power. In 2010 there was this constant comparison of migrant communities to those labour migrants who came to the United States to build the automotive industry, and saying that at that time, we need to bring more migrants, more refugees, to Detroit so that they could also build the city the way they built the automobile. So, it was at that time where I started to kind of really become, you know, personally, very uncomfortable with the idea of value-added migration. And this also speaks to what Ayşe was saying, is that migrants and refugees included, carry a specific worth at a particular historical junction. In 2015 actually, 2016 I was in in a Nationalism Studies program at CEU, which is also where I met Ayşe in our in the class that I was taking, that she was giving. And I really, you know, was able to think about the conceptual frameworks of displacement and emplacement, and understanding cities through economic restructuring, and really understanding a way to position migrants within that framework, rather than studying migration through a singular lens. So, in that process, is how I became interested in understanding the location of migrants in cities like Detroit, but location of migrants in broader and global structures of capital accumulation. And something that was really important to me, and that I continue to kind of ask, is, what is the human cost of migration? And understanding that migrants are valuable actors, this is how I came about it, and this is still how some of these questions keep coming about as I continue.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ayşe, you said the kind of city really matters, whether it's wealthy, struggling, or somewhere in between. How do those differences shape who gets included and who gets pushed out?

Ayşe Çağlar  

I think who gets included and also who gets pushed out is an important question. But for me, this is a question of historical conjuncture. The very same people who were excluded could become cherished groups of people, and vice versa. With the changing geopolitical conditions and historical conjuncture. My work on the border city between Syria and Turkey actually showed that how a demonized group became a value. So thus, as I mentioned earlier, the worth and worthlessness of migrants for the cities is a variable in time. In my current research actually on the regimes of confined labour, containment and city-making, one could see that the displaced acquire value in very different ways in the same place by becoming part of the shifting circuits of capital and power, even the demonic past of the World War Two in certain cities could become part of cultural industries, revaluing the group's history. So, it is important to situate the emplacement of the displaced within those broader structures. It is important where you are, but to understand the dynamics of your incorporation, or emplacement, however you would call it, that is very much related to the broader dynamics, and that's why that the political economy of displacement is very much related to the political economy of the cities, and this is very much related with the broader shifts in the global capitalism.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ana your research shows how cities can look stable on the surface, but still quietly push people out through things like policy and planning. What do we miss when we don't name that as displacement?

Ana Ćuković  

I think what precisely actually enabled the austerity measures and the shocks to take place in Detroit is the amplified narrative of the city as a declining, post-apocalyptic landscape that somehow doesn't have any people, or any history, or any governance. As a city that is unable to manage itself and manage its people, which is a very racialized perspective on Detroit, considering at that time, it was more than 80% Black. So, I don't think that it's necessarily that the city looked stable on surface. It is that it was framed by specific interests at a particular point in time, and this is what is referred to as the historical conjuncture that enabled and facilitated and created the space that was thought of as somehow empty or needing to be redeveloped or restored by outside forces, and creating and amplifying that perception was what justified the implementation of large scale urban development projects, of the need to attract new people, not that there was not a necessity to grow the tax base, and that the population across the economic spectrum wasn't leaving, but it is that it enabled a narrative of a need for a particular type of population that could somehow restore Detroit's historical place as a very valuable player in the global networks of power. So, for example, today, you know, between 2017 and 2025 the median income in Detroit increased by only 1% but some of the housing and real estate increased by over 100%. So, the disparities last beyond the policies and planning projects that are somehow taking place right now. But I think what's important is to, you know, really move beyond what is in surface, and move beyond these analytical categories of migrants or non-migrants, to really understand the outcomes of crisis and austerity that then somehow becomes reframed into revitalization, regeneration and so forth.

Maggie Perzyna  

Maybe building on what both of you have said, what's still missing from how we talk about displacement in research, in media and in public life? Ayşe?

Ayşe Çağlar  

I know that the displacement concept is being now much more widely used, but it is important to make that difference. It is not just another term to replace migration or mobility. Because the moment that you use it comes with a particular kind of a conceptual network, but it is also a particular perspective of political economy. It is not simply migration. When the moment you are talking about displacement, then you are connecting this kind of process to various other processes and structural dynamics in other places. So, cities became very significant due to their dual role. They became key frontiers of capital accumulation, but also increasingly more contested battlefields over resources, space, rights, and justice. In emphasizing and praising the rise of cities in migration governance, I think it is very important to place this increasing autonomy and prominence within the broader context of restructuring of capital, namely neoliberal restructuring, within which state power is rescaled. However, I think we now face a political moment different from classical neoliberal urbanism. We are facing a resurgence of the state power in urban governance, the recentralization of state, and this is definitely not a simple return to traditional nation state control, but a reconfiguration of state power. And I have the feeling that migration scholars, especially who are working on cities, seem to be missing that dynamic. I think they fail to account for these shifting dynamics of the global political economy, and I think one of the reasons behind that is the lack of a global perspective on evolving and changing forms of accumulation and capitalism. The concentration of power is reshaping how cities and displaced are governed. And within this context, I find the rhetoric of decentralization sustaining the appearance of democratic urban governance very dangerous in terms of masking the concentration of power and its political consequences. So, I think that emphasis on displacement has to be really anchored into a political economy perspective, in a broader global perspective, and recognizing these dynamics is essential, I think if we were to develop a more critical understanding of governance of the displaced and urban politics today.

Ana Ćuković  

And I would like to add to exactly what Ayşe was saying. I will start that oftentimes and especially in city politics, we are seeing the concept of displacement is coming up and being used in many different ways. And sometimes people don't have to be physically removed to be displaced in a way. What I want to emphasize is that if there's, for example, increase in rents, if there's water shut offs, if there's an inability for people to stay in their neighborhood, or to stay in their city due to the economic restructuring, we are not just seeing kind of the, you know, displacement of people in general, but also the dispossession of wealth, of power, of connections, of ownership. For me, it is important to kind of understand what displacement results in and how power reconfigures at that time. When we think about displacement and when we think about displacement in a global level, it is really important to connect the multiple forces that contribute to that displacement and to the way that this dispossession operates, to reform power, to reform struggles, political struggles in particular, and to reform ownership of whether It's land, whether it's resources, whether it's agency of people. When there's the narrative of migrant as a person who contributes to our neighborhoods, and you know, increases the tax value and contributes to diversity and culture, and you know, just really improves our communities and that's why we need them. That type of narrative often very much neglects and really marginalizes the fact that the reason many people do migrate is because of the very kind of constellations of power and capital that we are seeing in this country and the way it operates across the world. So, I do think that it is important, if we're talking about migration and if we're talking about displacement, that we actually think about it in very political and global terms, in understanding how this is connected to broader structures and not just an isolated aspect of you know, including people and making them feel welcomed and things like that without direct accountability of where this displacement comes from.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ayşe you've mentored many scholars who rethink migration from the ground up and across different disciplines. What are you learning from new researchers like Ana?

Ayşe Çağlar  

[Laughs] I think I learned so much from Ana, I have to reduce the long list. I think that I have learned from the young researchers, emerging scholars, very much. Sometimes I feel like I learned more from them than my peers. If I reduce this long list, I will say that I really learned importance of reading historical and archival material to tease out the tensions, inroads and contradictions of migrants and city-making in Detroit. Ana's work, I think, showed me how to refrain from a structuralist reading of those dynamics of displacement and dispossession, which I have to confess I have a tendency to do that. So, she was a very good influence on me to show that that's really important to look at those tensions between the really the community led initiatives, and how those labour struggles took place and how they were so important to understand the dynamics of displacement and dispossession. And also, I think that the Ana's work was an eye opener for me that the industries in the case of the automotive industry in Detroit, not only shaped the city, but shaped the individual and collective behaviour and of the worker. So, they produced those subjects. But when we talk about that, we should never lose sight of those dynamics of subject-making. And her work showed me actually how that subject-making happened through this spatial unevenness, but also within the automotive industry. And actually it helped me to think about it and to revalue the importance of historical work and not to fall into the maze of structuralism.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, Ana, maybe the same question for you, in terms of Ayşe work as migration scholarship moves forward what are the key concepts, do you think that Ayşe has kind of made you think of that should be retained?

Ana Ćuković  

There's always a very conscious and deliberate rigour within which cities, concepts, perspectives are approached. And I worked with Ayşe and continued to work with her for almost 10 years. And as a student, I was always challenged to be extremely rigorous and never take for granted things that I see around me or scholarship that I read and be able to really understand and trace where some of the concepts come from, what they mean and what they intend to say, but also to always be able to kind of put different phenomena in relation to one another, and also position them in a global perspective. So, really, really being attuned to these details, because oftentimes they become neglected. Or what Aisha was saying, you know, with mobility studies, you don't have to talk about power, you don't have to talk about capital, but really being able to understand how to have a full picture of what is actually going on. So, it is this way of seeing things, and being able to see what you're seeing through, you know, concepts like displacement, like emplacement, like networks of power, like a multiscalar approach to cities. So, really having this conceptual network of ways of explaining things around us and not making them temporary, but rather, actually having an arsenal of concepts and ways of explaining what is happening today and how that relates to historical conjunctures and also to broader global processes.

Maggie Perzyna  

Well, it's very, very clear from the conversation we had today how there's just so much conceptual rigour in the work that both of you do, and it's so nice to see how your research complements one another. So, thank you both so much for being here today and for sharing with us. 

Maggie Perzyna  

And before I let you go, we're doing a little lightning round at the end. So, I'm going to throw out some questions, and you just give me the first thing that pops to your mind. Okay, it's going to be four quick questions. So, Ayşe, let's start with you. Your favorite book:

Ayşe Çağlar  

I will tell you, Invisible Cities.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ana, favorite book?

Ana Ćuković  

Seventh man, by John Berger.

Maggie Perzyna  

I love you guys. You guys are the quickest so far. Okay, next question, what policy buzzword should disappear? Ayşe?

Ayşe Çağlar  

Participatory. Participate, because I won't believe the way they use it.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ana?

Ana Ćuković  

I would also say participatory. Yeah, and like, "community inclusion". I don't know what this means.

Ayşe Çağlar  

You could take inclusion. Inclusive also.

Maggie Perzyna  

All right, we've got a few. Okay, next question, favorite place that you've done field work or research? Ayşe?

Ayşe Çağlar  

Berlin.

Maggie Perzyna  

Ana?

Ana Ćuković  

Well, Detroit, but I will say the archives was the best part.

Maggie Perzyna  

And last but not least, one thing we can't learn about you from your CV. Ayşe?

Ayşe Çağlar  

I think if you have an eye, you could learn but my life has never been a straight line. My scholarship and my trajectory has never been a straight line. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Ana?

Ana Ćuković  

For me, I do think it's also like the lack of a straight line and always flying by the seat of my pants. I think, in my scholarship and what I have learned from you know, scholars like Ayşe and advisors like Ayşe is that you have to be very rigorous in what you're doing always.

Maggie Perzyna  

Well, there you go. I always joke with my family that if I had to write a book, it would be called the longest, most crooked road. So, there you go. We all have something in common. Thank you both so, so, so, much for the amazing discussion today.

Ayşe Çağlar  

Thank you very much. 

Ana Ćuković  

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Maggie Perzyna  

Thanks so much to Ayşe Çağlar, and Ana Ćuković, for joining me today, and thank you for listening. This episode was produced by Toronto Metropolitan University journalism student Kristian Cuaresma, alongside Executive Producer Angela Glover. Special thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and CERC Migration for making this conversation possible. If you've enjoyed Borders & Belonging, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn. For more on today's conversation, check out the show notes.