Ayse Çağlar is a sociologist and an anthropologist. She is a University Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna and is a permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. She held several visiting professorships in different European universities and fellowships such as Jean Monnet (EUI, Florence), Minerva (Max Planck, Göttingen) and at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School, Swedish Collegium. She is a member of Academia Europaea. She has been co-directing the research platforms “Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration” at the IWM as well as the “Challenges of Urban Futures: Governing the Complexities in European Cities”, at the University of Vienna.

Çağlar’s work and publications focused on the interfaces of migration, urban restructuring, dispossession, displacement, confined labor, extractivism, and the transformations of statehood and the governance of cities especially. Most of her work is comparative and there is a special emphasis on disempowered cities and on wars. She has edited, co-edited and co-authored Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants (Cornell University Press, 2010); Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration (Duke University Press, 2018); Urbaner Protest. Revolte in der neoliberalen Stadt (Passagen Verlag, 2019); Displacements and Dispossessions (2020); Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas (Albany: SUNY Press (2024).