Skip to Main Content
You are now in the main content area
Sedef Arat-Koc

Sedef Arat-Koç

Associate Professor
EducationPhD (Sociology): Toronto
Phone(416) 979-5000 x 557338

Biography

Sedef Arat-Koç is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration, and a member of the Yeates School of Graduate Studies, at Toronto Metropolitan University . She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her Ph.D. thesis is entitled Peasants, Hegemony and the Politics of “Normal Times”: The Cases of the Republican Peoples’ Party and the Democrat Party, Turkey. She also holds a Master of Arts in Sociology from the University of Waterloo, and a Bachelor of Arts from Bogazici Üniversitesi (Turkey).

Dr. Arat-Koç joined the Department of Politics and Public Administration in January 2006. Before coming to Toronto Met, she was Associate Professor at the Women’s Studies Program and the Department of Sociology at Trent University.

Sedef’s research interests include immigration policy and citizenship, especially as they affect immigrant women; transnational feminism; politics of imperialism; racialization and the politics of racism; and reconfiguration of social and political identities under neoliberal globalization. Currently, she is working on “whiteness” in Turkey as a cultural, political and class identity in the context of neoliberalism and post-cold war geopolitics.

  • “Dance of Orientalisms and Waves of Catastrophes: Culturalism and Pragmatism in Imperial Approaches to Islam and the Middle East.” Third World Quarterly 35:9 (2014): 1656-1671.
  • “Power in/through Speaking of Terror: The Geopolitics and Anti-Politics of Discourses on Violence in Other Places.” In At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror, ed. Suvendrini Perera and Sherene Razack, 356-379.  Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2014.
  • “Rethinking Whiteness, ‘Culturalism,” and the Bourgeoisie in the Age of Neoliberalism” In Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories, ed. Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua, 311-339.  Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2014.
  • “Görünmezlik ve Aşırı Görünürlülük Paradoksu: Neoliberal Kanada’nın Kamu Politikaları ve Siyasal Söylemlerinde Kültürelleşme ve ‘Toplumsal Cinsiyet’ ” [“Paradox of Invisibility and Hypervisibility: Culturalism and Gender in Canadian Public Policy and Political Discourse”].  In 21. Yüzyıl Feminizmine Doğru: Neoliberalizmin Ötesinde Bir Kadın Hareketi İçin Tartışmalar [Towards a 21st Century Feminism: Debates on a Women’s Movement Beyond Neoliberalism], ed. Aynur Özuğurlu, 95-122.  Ankara: Notabene Yayınevi, 2013.
  • “Invisibilized, Individualized, and Culturalized: Paradoxical Invisibility and Hyper-Visibility of Gender in Policy Making and Policy Discourse in Neoliberal Canada.” Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme (CWS/cf) 29:3 (Spring/Summer 2012): 6-17.
  • “A Transnational Whiteness? New Middle Classes, Globalism and Non-European ‘Whiteness’.” in On Whiteness (e-book), ed. Nicky Falkof and Oliver Cashman-Brown.  Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012.
  • “New Whiteness(es), Beyond the Colour Line? Assessing the Contradictions and Complexities of ‘Whiteness’ in the (Geo)Political Economy of Capitalist Globalism.”  In States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century, ed. Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith and Sunera Thobani, 147-168. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010.
  • “Contesting or Affirming 'Europe'? European Enlargement, Aspirations for 'Europeanness' and New Identities in the Margins of Europe.”  Journal of Contemporary European Studies 18:2 (June 2010):  181-191.
  • “Whose Transnationalism?  Canada, ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Discourse, and Arab and Muslim Canadians.”  In  Colonialism and Racism in Canada: Historical Traces and Contemporary Issues, ed. Maria A. Wallis, Lina Sunseri, and Grace-Edward Galabuzi, 266-283.  Toronto:  Nelson Education Ltd., 2010.   Reprinted, with permission, from Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada, ed. Lloyd Wong and Vic Satzewich, 216-240. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2006.
  • “A Cultural Turn in Politics: Bourgeois Class Identity and White-Turk Discourses.” In Hegemonic Transitions, The State and Crisis in Neoliberal Capitalism, ed. Yildiz Atasoy, 209-226. Routledge Studies in Governance and Change in the Global Era.  London and New York:  Routledge, 2009.
  • "(Some) Turkish Transnationalism(s) in an Age of Capitalist Globalization and Empire: 'White Turk' Discourse, The New Geopolitics and the Implications for Feminist Transnationalism." Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (Special Issue: Transnational Theory, National Politics and Gender in the Contemporary Middle East/North Africa) 3:1 (2007): 35-57.
  • “Echoes of the 1930s: Today’s Hotel Workers Lead the Struggle to ‘Upgrade’ the Service Economy” (with Bryan Evans and Aparna Sundar). Relay: A Socialist Project Review (Jan.-Feb. 2007): 16-17. [Reprinted (external link)  by MRzine (On-line Monthly Review), March 15, 2007]
  • “Whose Social Reproduction? Transnational Motherhood and Challenges to Feminist Political Economy.” In Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism, ed. Meg Luxton and Kate Bezanson, 75-92. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.
  • “Whose Transnationalism? Canada, “Clash of Civilizations” Discourse and Arab and Muslim Canadians.” In Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada, ed. Lloyd Wong and Vic Satzewich, 216-240. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2006.
  • “The Disciplinary Boundaries of Canadian Identity After 9/11: Civilizational Identity, Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Anti-Imperialist Feminism.” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order, (Special Issue: Race, Racism and Empire: Reflections on Canada) 32:4 (2005): 32-49.
  • “Imperial Wars or Benevolent Interventions? Reflections on ‘Global Feminism’ Post September 11th.” Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal 26:2 (Spring/Summer 2002): 53-65.
    • Reprinted with revisions in: Open Boundaries: A Canadian Women’s Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Barbara Crow and Lise Gotell, 126-134. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada, 2005.
  • Caregivers Break the Silence. A Participatory Action Research on the Abuse and Violence, Including the Impact of Family Separation Experienced by Women in the Live-in Caregiver Program. Toronto: INTERCEDE, 2001.
  • “Neoliberalism, State Restructuring and Immigration: Changes in Canadian Policies in the 1990s.” Journal of Canadian Studies 34:2 (1999): 31-56.
  • “Gender and Race in ‘Non-Discriminatory’ Immigration Policies in Canada: 1960s to the Present.” In Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist Thought, ed. Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson, 207-233. Toronto: Women's Press, 1999.
  • “Coming to Terms with ‘Hijab’ in Canada and Turkey: Agonies of a Secular and Anti-Orientalist Emigre Feminist.” In Emigre Feminism, ed. Alena Heitlinger, 173-188. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
  • “NAC's Response to the Immigration Legislative Review Report ‘Not Just Numbers: A Canadian Framework for Future Immigration’.” In Canadian Woman Studies, Special Issue on Immigrant and Refugee Women 19:3 (Fall 1999): 18-23.
  • “‘Good Enough to Work but Not Good Enough to Stay’: Foreign Domestic Workers and the Law.” In Locating Law: Race/Class/Gender Connections, ed. Elizabeth Comack, 125-151. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1999.
  • “From ‘Mothers of the Nation’ to Migrant Workers: Immigration Policies and Domestic Workers in Canadian History.” In Not one of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada, ed. Abbie Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, 53-79. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
  • Maid in the Market: Women's Paid Domestic Labour (co-edited with Wenona Giles). Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1994.
  • “Immigration Policies, Migrant Domestic Workers and the Definition of Citizenship in Canada.” In Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Multiculturalism and Racism in 90's Canada, ed. Vic Satzewich, 229-242. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1992.
    • Reprinted in Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, 3rd ed., ed. Veronica Strong-Boag and Anita Clair Fellman, 283-298. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997.
  • Looking Through the Kitchen Window: The Politics of Home and Family, 2nd ed. (with Meg Luxton and Harriet Rosenberg). Toronto: Garamond Press, 1990.
  • “In the Privacy of Our Own Home: Foreign Domestic Workers as Solution to the Crisis of the Domestic Sphere in Canada.” Studies in Political Economy 28 (Spring 1989): 33-58.
    • Reprinted in: Feminism in Action: Studies in Political Economy, ed. M. Patricia Connely and Pat Armstrong, 149-174. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1992.
    • Revised and Updated Version Published as: “Politics of the Family and Politics of Immigration in the Subordination of Domestic Workers in Canada.” In Family Patterns and Gender Relations, 2nd ed., ed. Bonnie Fox, 352-374. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001.
    • Revised and updated version reprinted in Gender in the 1990s, ed. E. D. Nelson and B. W. Robinson, 413-442. Nelson Canada, 1995.