Faime Alpagu, BA MA

PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Vienna; ÖAW Junior fellow

Faime Alpagu studied Sociology in Istanbul and Vienna. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna. Her dissertation project is funded by a doctoral scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and received the 2016 Dissertation Award for Research on Migration from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The project centers on photographs and letters sent by “guest workers” to family members in Turkey between 1960 and 1989. These primary materials are complemented by official documents and recently conducted biographic-narrative interviews. The aim is to reveal the complex interactions between different modes of expression (visual/verbal), time relations (now/then), and spatial constellations (here/there). In 2019 she was a Junior Visiting Fellow at The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. In 2019 – 1920 she was Junior Visiting Fellow at the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna. Her current research areas are migration/refugee studies, biographical research, visual sociology, memory, and interpretive social research.

PhD Thesis:

Migration Narratives Juxtaposed: A Sociological Analysis of Photos, (Audio)Letters and Biographies of 'Guest Workers' from Turkey Living in Austria

Email: faime.alpagu@univie.ac.at