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Department of Human Geography

Hülya Arik

Hulya Arik
Assistant Professor
Email
hulya.arik@utoronto.ca
Building HL 532

Hülya Arik is an Assistant Professor at the Geography Department of University of Toronto, Canada. Her research centers on the tension between religion, secularism and security through studies on political Islam and Islamophobia, and on Muslim cultural politics with a focus on cultural and creative industries. Currently she explores the cultural and creative geographies of secularism and Islam in Turkey through a study of Islamic and traditional visual arts in Istanbul from the 1990s onwards. Before joining University of Toronto, Hulya was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Gothenburg Cultural Sciences Department. She has published in academic journals such as Cultural Geographies, Gender, Place and Culture, Security Dialogue, and Social and Cultural Geography. 

Education

PhD 2015 Geography, York University, Toronto, Canada 
MA 2006 Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary 
BA 2003 English Literature, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey 

Teaching Interests

  • GGRA02 Geographies of Global Processes (UTSC)
  • GGRC31 Qualitative Geographical Methods: Places and Ethnography (UTSC)
  • GGRC02 Population Geography (UTSC)
  • JPG1816 Geographies of Secularism and Islam (UTSG)

Research Interests

My current research focus is on the cultural geographies of secularism and Islam in Turkey through a study of Islamic and traditional visual arts in Istanbul from the 1990s onwards. This research aims to unravel the cultural politics of Islam and its entanglement with neoliberalism as manifested in the emergence of this new cultural industry that developed primarily through involvement of young pious women artists. Muslim and feminist geopolitics, urban and cultural geographies of Islam and critical approaches to cultural and creative industries in non-European contexts emerge as the leading themes in this research project. 

  • feminist geographies of the body 
  • feminist geopolitics 
  • security and risk studies 
  • critical geographies of secularism and Islam 
  • cultural geography 
  • geographies of creativity 

Publications