About me

Thank you for visiting my webpage!

I am a political sociologist studying migration, citizenship, and the politics of inclusion. I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center on Global Justice at the University of California, San Diego, and a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University's Institute for Advancing Just Societies. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from UC San Diego in 2025.

My book project, Refugees as Citizen-Material, develops the citizen-material framework to explain how refugee governance functions as a tool of nation-building and demographic engineering. States strategically admit refugees who embody preferred ethnic, religious, or ideological traits while marginalizing domestic populations deemed incompatible with national ideals. Refugee inclusion and minority exclusion thus operate as parts of a single demographic project. Tracing this logic from the late Ottoman Empire to contemporary Turkey, the book draws on archival research in Ottoman and Modern Turkish across archives in Turkey, Belgium, and Geneva.

My second line of research extends these questions to climate displacement. I examine how governments allocate protection across populations facing environmental risk, why some vulnerabilities become objects of collective intervention while others remain fragmented or overlooked, and how scientific knowledge about emerging risks enters policy. Collaborative projects in California and Massachusetts bring together researchers, policymakers, and community stakeholders to study governance and protection in the context of low-probability, high-impact events.

My work combines comparative-historical research with policy-engaged scholarship and appears in peer-reviewed journals such as International Migration, as well as in book chapters, policy papers, and public-facing reports. Before and during my Ph.D., I conducted human-rights research in Turkey and contributed analysis to UNHCR's World on the Move.

I am dedicated to engaged, community-oriented teaching. At UC San Diego, I have designed and taught courses on immigration, political sociology, qualitative interviewing, and comparative-historical methods. Teaching near the U.S.–Mexico border has shaped a pedagogy built on experiential learning, original student research, and connections between academic training and applied work on migration and social policy. I have also mentored seven undergraduate research assistants, one of whom co-authored a published article with me. My work has been recognized with the IGCC Dissertation Fellowship, the Barbara and Paul Saltman Excellence in Teaching Award, and UC San Diego's Interdisciplinary Research Award.

Across my work, I use migration and displacement as lenses into a broader question: how states determine whom to incorporate, whom to protect, and whose futures become objects of political concern.

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The original spelling of my name: Şevin Gülfer Sağnıç

How to pronounce my name:  "Ş" is pronounced as "Sh", S(h)evin.  

Fun fact: my name means "night" in Kurdish, and coincidentally, I was born late at night.