Professor Engin Isin, BCP (METU), MA (Waterloo), PhD (Toronto)

Profile

Engin’s research and teaching focus on doing international politics: the ways in which people make themselves agents of international politics through acts, movements, and struggles.

Engin holds a bachelor's degree from Middle East Technical University (Turkey) and graduate degrees from the Universities of Waterloo (MA) and Toronto (PhD). He developed an early interest in continental philosophy and was educated as an historical sociologist and political sociologist.

Engin was a professor of social science (1996-2002) and Canada Research Chair (2002-2006) at York University, and a professor of politics at The Open University (2007-2016) before joining Queen Mary in 2017. Same

Engin is a chief editor of the journal Citizenship Studies, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2022.

Postgraduate Teaching

POL700 Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training Seminar. Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship (QMUL-LTDS)

LISS340 Performativity of Methods. The London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP)

Research

Research Interests:

Engin has undertaken historical and political sociological studies of British imperial and colonial practices in Africa, America, Asia and Middle East, Ottoman imperial and colonial practices in Europe and Middle East and North Africa and French colonialism in Quebec, Haiti, and Algeria. He has also conducted historical sociology of citizenship in Canada and Europe.

The driving force in all Engin’s studies has been the tension between imperial, colonial or national designs for conduct of people and how people subvert these designs by performative acts and invent political subjectivities. This is the tension he often explores in how people constitute themselves as international citizens.

Examples of research funding:

Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholars programme

Publications

This is a select list, please visit Engin's website "The Subject of Politics" for more publications

Isin E. (2019) Doing Rights with Things In: Evert K., Hildebrandt P., Peters S., et al. (eds) Performing Citizenship: Bodies, Agencies, Limitations London: Palgrave.

---.(2019) Peuples Mobiles : Configurations Transversales. Anthropologie & développement 50: 129-143.

---.(2021) Bedeutungen Von Citizenship. Polis: report der deutschen vereinigung für politische bildung 1: 7-14.

---.(2021) Citizenship. In: Valverde M., Clarke K.M., Darian-Smith E., et al. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society. London: Routledge, 94-97.

---.(2021) Citizenship. In: Baker M., Blaagaard B., Jones H., et al. (eds) The Routledge Encylopedia of Citizen Media. London: Routledge, 55-61.

Isin E. and Ruppert E. (2019) Data Politics: The Birth of Sensory Power. Available at: https://bit.ly/2XZ8UmW.

---.(2019) Data's Empire: Postcolonial Data Politics. In: Bigo D., Isin E. and Ruppert E. (eds) Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights. London: Routledge.

---.(2020) Being Digital Citizens, London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

---.(2020) The Birth of Sensory Power: How a Pandemic Made It Visible. Big Data & Society: 1-15.

---.(2020) Digital Citizens yet to Come. Being Digital Citizens. 2nd ed. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 173-193.

Supervision

Deirdre Troy, The Imperial Politics of Citizenship Revocation (2017)

Sophie Crowe, Dissensus and its discontents: disruptive migrant politics in Israel’s social order (2017)

Janina Pescinski, Acts of Passage: Making Rights Claims at the Franco-Italian Border (2018)

Benedetta Zocchi, The Making of the Frontier: Teasing the EU Border in the Bosnian Canton of Una Sana (2019

Lucy Kneebone, Politics of the In-between: Struggles over Camps  (2019)

Public Engagement

Engin has worked with numerous non-governmental organisations, activist groups, galleries, and museums over the years. Most recent of these include Migration Museum Project, Tate Modern, Counterpoints Arts, and ACT REAL.