Tankut Atuk

I joined the Department of STS as an Assistant Professor of Sociology of Public Health and Medicine. I am an interdisciplinary scholar whose research is situated at the intersections of Public/Global Health, Medical Sociology/Anthropology, Social Epidemiology, and Queer Health Activism. In addition to master’s degrees in Gender Studies and Sociology, I hold a PhD in Feminist Studies & Anthropology. Through community-engaged and activist research, I seek to understand and redress the ways in which public health policies, institutions, and practices reproduce the inequalities they promise to address.

My forthcoming book, Against Immunity: The Pathogenic Life of Public Health, is under contract with Columbia University Press. Drawing on research on the highly politicized HIV epidemic in Türkiye, the book examines how public health becomes a pathogenic technology, leaving HIV-negative people, particularly LGBTQI+ communities, susceptible to infection and people living with HIV exposed to socio-medical violence. It rethinks public health through community rather than immunity and proposes a minoritarian model of public health grounded in the knowledge, relationships, and struggles of those whom dominant health institutions fail to protect.

My new research project explores the futures of HIV cure, asking what a cure might mean for people living with HIV and for the extensive infrastructures of care, activism, and public health assembled around the epidemic. Centering cure preparedness, the project examines equitable access, the future of community organizations and services, and the persistence of HIV’s social and political life beyond a biomedical cure.

I also maintain an ongoing interest in the intersections of AI, care, and chatbots in healthcare. I conceptualize these systems as “ghostly technologies,” examining how they evoke the presence of care and human connection while obscuring the absences, failures, and inequalities that shape their operation. I welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students and researchers interested in these questions and in critical approaches to public and global health.

I firmly agree with bell hooks that education can be a practice of freedom and that he can create better futures and contribute to local and global struggles for equality and self-determination through education. I follow developments in teaching pedagogies and strategies to remain up to date with students’ learning needs. My teaching philosophy draws from feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial pedagogies and embraces Paolo Freire’s problem-solving method in which the primary role of the instructor is to create the right conditions for students to discover the answers for themselves, while being guided and trained in the ways of independent, creative, and free thinking. I teach courses that center not only active learning but also student well-being. 

I am passionate about teaching and researching, but I am also aware that radical social change is not possible without activism and community involvement. I am an active member of grassroots HIV organizations in and beyond Turkey. As an activist-scholar, I am especially invested in producing academic work that is not divorced from the lived realities and is capable of intervening in structural inequalities and injustices.