Kerem Ussakli

Kerem is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on intersections of mobility, sovereignty and displacement in the Middle East. Kerem’s dissertation project, tentatively titled Trust, Sovereignty, and Social Lives of Displacement in Iraq, looks into a particular sponsorship agreement called kafala, which has a long-standing, multivalent, and complex history in the Middle East, and has emerged as a way of regulating internal displacement in Iraq after 2003. It shows how these sponsorship agreements are articulated through a host of practices and social relations: of trust, hospitality, friendship, kinship, accusation, and security. His doctoral research was funded by the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.