Dr Hamide Elif Üzümcü
Nominated Fellow, June - August, 2026 (Previously IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2024 - July 2025)
Home institution: Social Sciences University of Ankara, Türkiye
Hamide Elif Üzümcü is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Social Sciences University of Ankara in Türkiye and an Associate Fellow at the Alwaleed Centre, University of Edinburgh, UK. Prior to this appointment, she was an IASH–Alwaleed Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. Elif also worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on a multinational project in family sociology, conducting the UK fieldwork, and taught Sociology of Cultural Processes, at the University of Padua in Italy, where she was awarded a PhD cum Laude (with Honours) in Social Sciences in 2021. Her doctoral research on children’s intrafamilial privacy, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Türkiye, was awarded the Turkish Social Sciences Association’s Young Social Scientist Prize in 2023. Elif currently serves as an editorial board member of Children & Society and as Communications Manager and board member of the International Sociological Association’s RC53 Sociology of Childhood Research Committee. Alongside her academic work, she continues to write sociological fiction, among these is the published story Chronicles of Constrained Negotiations.
Project title: Construction of Islamic Environmental Ethics through Sufi Narrative Traditions in Family Life
This project investigates how children and families within the Sufi tradition in the United Kingdom construct environmental ethics through Islamic storytelling. It aims to (i) document the living cultural narrative heritage of Sufism as part of the everyday lives of families in the UK; (ii) propose Sufism’s holistic understanding of the environment as a theoretical alternative, challenging Western-centric perspectives on conceptualising environmental relationships, supported by empirical evidence from everyday family life; and (iii) offer creative, narrative-based methodological contributions to childhood studies. This research offers a timely and original contribution by making visible Sufism’s comprehensive perspective on environmental engagement through an artistic lens grounded in its storytelling cultures. Funded by an IASH–Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellowship, part of the research was conducted with parents and children aged 12–15 from families engaging with Sufi traditions. A multi-layered dataset was generated through narrative interviews, arts-based story design workshops with children, and participant observation in traditional Sufi gatherings.
During the current residency at IASH, the project, funded by the TÜBİTAK 2219 International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Programme of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye, and hosted by the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, will advance through in-depth analysis of the collected data. It will also foster wider academic and public engagement through children’s Sufi stories reflecting Islamic environmental ethics, which will be exhibited in a digital archive, the Digital Museum of Sufi Contemporary Art by Children and Young People.