Pinar Ensari

Research Interests

My research interests encompass migration studies, borders and borderlands, gender studies, and critical masculinity studies. My PhD dissertation investigates how bordering, understood as a multi-scalar assemblage enacted across mobility, border, and space, shapes gendered lives in the Turkey-Georgia borderlands following the 1988 opening of the Sarp border gate. I explore how a diverse range of actors, practices, and processes—including state policies, local patriarchal structures, and the everyday economic and spatial practices of locals—engage in various forms of borderwork, thereby shaping and being shaped by gender. Previously, my MA thesis examined the ways in which Kurdish women students in Istanbul, Turkey, have constructed their political subjectivities at the crossroads of education and politics.

Select Publications

• Ilcan, S., Ensari, P., & Gonzalez Balyk, L. (Eds.). (2025). From antagonism to care: Reimagining academic freedom and justice in higher education. Studies in Social Justice. (In press).
• Aglietti, C., Delaney, C., Ensari, P., Ghidoni, E., Harroche, A., Still, A. & Türker, N. (2023). (Better) stories from the pandemic. Örebro University Press.
• Ensari, P. (2021). Book Review: Şule Can, Refugee Encounters at the Turkish-Syrian Border: Antakya at the Crossroads. Routledge: London and New York, 2019. International Migration, 59(2), 266-268.
• Ensari, P. (2021). Book Review: Ayşe Çağlar and Nina Glick Schiller, Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration, Urban Geography.