Anna J. Secor is a political geographer who does research on questions of space, the subject, and the state. Most often, these themes are interwoven through the case of Turkey, the site where she conducts multi-method fieldwork-based research. In recent work, Secor has argued that to understand ideas of “rights” or “justice” we need to look at the everyday spatial practices through which people come into relation with the police, state officials, courts, schools and state hospitals. Her work has addressed how state and society are delineated through practices that terrorize and alienate individuals, at the same time as they hold them in a relationship of longing, still pursuing an idea of rights and justice through the state (see publications in Environment and Planning D, and Violent Geographies). Secor is currently working on two collaborative projects. Funded by an NSF collaborative research grant (BCS-0723986 and BCS-0722825), Secor and collaborator Banu Gokariksel (Department of Geography, University of North Carolina) have launched a study of the Turkish veiling-fashion industry (see our web site: http://veilingfashion.unc.edu/index.php). They argue that to understand veiling-fashion as it plays out across economic, political and cultural fields is to enter into a new understanding of the role of Islam in the global arena today. Findings from this project have been published in Area, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. Theories of space and subjectivity are at the heart of another collaborative project, with Virginia Blum (Department of English, University of Kentucky), on trauma and the co-constitution of material and psychic space. Broadly, this research will contribute to a cross-disciplinary understanding of how the material spaces of our lives both map and reflect psychic space.

Anna Secor teaches courses at the undergraduate level in Political Geography and Geography of the Middle East. She teaches graduate courses in Political Geography and Social Theory.

Anna Secor earned her PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado in 2000.