Center for Uncertainty Studies Blog

I started working at Bielefeld University, in IKG, as a guest researcher in 2019, with a research fund provided by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, to continue my studies on intergroup relations, othering, and polarization, which had been interrupted in Turkey due to political reasons. In my dissertation, I demonstrated how glorified ingroup identities may fuel hostile, inhumane attitudes toward others and trigger intolerance and polarization at the societal level. IKG, as a pioneering institute for research on intergroup conflict and relevant concepts of discrimination, integration, and similar social and political processes, has been an ideal space for me to continue my studies and pursue my career as a political psychologist. After working on othering and discrimination for a while, thanks to Prof. Andreas Zick and the strong, enriching interdisciplinary tradition of the institute, I expanded my core interests to transnational dynamics and political mobilization of migrants on the one hand and collective dynamics of global crises, political attitudes (democracy/antidemocracy, trust, authoritarianism), and societal divisions on the other. Now, my main research focuses on why and how individuals and groups are inclined to power politics instead of deliberative politics in ordinary and emergent contexts, which centralizes uncertainty and insecurity. 

Glynis Breakwell, a well-known British social psychologist, states that despite uncertainty having always been more prevalent than certainty in the history of humanity, the complexity of the communication channels and the incredible speed of information exchange in the digital era makes the 21st century peculiar in terms of societal level uncertainty. Not only the ongoing global polycrises but the ways individuals and social groups give meaning to these are changing, and each attempt to understand the world (which is vital for individuals to adapt) includes a fragment of uncertainty regarding their knowledge about what is going on or regarding their capacity to infer what will happen in the future. Globalized information exchange may open people's horizons to new knowledge, but the amount and the speed not only create doubts about the content of the information (like in the cases of misinformation), but also impairs the sense of control and increases the need for certainty and security. In my research, I try to understand how this situation is radiating into people's support of specific political regimes. I want to see how the ongoing global context involving uncertainties at different levels interacts with individual and group-level political attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. On the other side of the medal, we also know that the states themselves do govern the contexts of crises and discursively construct what is ordinary and what is emergent, and so navigating uncertainty is not only an individual reaction but also a macro-political discourse. In my research on the politics of uncertainty, I would like to demonstrate the interplay of these different uncertainties in daily political dynamics.  

CeUS is an excellent opportunity for understanding the role of navigating uncertainty in societal processes for social and political scientists since it provides a flexible, interdisciplinary, functional, institutional and organizational structure. The concept itself is multidimensional and multilevel, requiring interdisciplinary collaboration to elaborate all its constructive and destructive influences on societies. We conceptualize uncertainty relationally rather than as an essentialist paradigm. This will enable us, the researchers, to benefit from the processes and outcomes of the other disciplines while unraveling the modes of navigating the uncertainty, at different levels and in different contexts. The organizational structure of CeUS facilitates this inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. This also makes the Center a well-established, promising learning hub for young scientists and researchers interested in uncertainty phenomena. 

I have a bachelor's and a master’s degree in psychology and completed my PhD in political science. The field I align my research on is political psychology, which is, by nature, interdisciplinary. Therefore, the theoretical frameworks and the methodological approaches I utilize in my research require an interdisciplinary perspective. While trying to understand the individual and collective aspects of political attitudes and behaviors, the intersection of psychology and politics is even more enriching, relying on the theories of sociology, social anthropology, or history. I suppose that one of the most crucial aspects of working in an interdisciplinary field is benefiting from critical, decolonial and reflexive modes of knowledge production. So, interdisciplinarity, particularly for a social and political scientist, should be accompanied by critical approaches when dealing with the issues of societal processes. 

Firstly, I was impressed by the diversity of perspectives, disciplines, and topics centralizing uncertainty. Ranging from climate change to minority issues or from public health to economics, there was a variety of studies demonstrating how crucial and critical it is to grasp uncertainty, it’s mechanisms, it’s forms, and it’s influences. I realized that apart from being an important space for knowledge production, CeUS can also be a hub that incorporates this colossal potential into well-structured scientific collaborations. Then, apart from the politics of uncertainty studies that correspond to my interests and research areas like uncertain peace or utilization of uncertainty by right-wing politics, Carlo Jaeger's keynote speech, titled "Uncertainty in Anthropocene," was quite exciting and thought-provoking, in stating that achievements of humankind throughout the history to manage or control the uncertainty also led them towards the global uncertainties, in a paradoxical way. I think this was the moment for all of us, the audience, to contemplate our current understandings and visions about the research on uncertainty.