I am a sociologist who studies how people make places and how places, in turn, shape social life. My research moves across neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations to examine how spatial arrangements organize culture, health, political life, and safety. Across these settings, I am interested in how inequality becomes embedded in the places people inhabit, and how people negotiate, reproduce, and sometimes transform those arrangements in everyday life.

I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology from Syracuse University. I am currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Yeditepe University and a Research Affiliate at the University of Mississippi, where I previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor.

My first book, The Order of Taste: Whiteness, Space, and Cosmopolitan America, is under contract with the University of Georgia Press. The book examines how segregation, redlining, suburbanization, and urban change shaped the development of cosmopolitan taste in postwar America. Focusing on restaurants and the experiences of immigrant restaurateurs, it shows how racialized geographies did more than exclude. They also structured the forms in which cultural difference could enter mainstream commercial and social life, making difference available as a selective and often consumable form of cosmopolitanism.

My second book project, Making Do, Making Power: Everyday Survival, Migration, and the Architecture of Turkish Mass Politics, turns to Turkey to examine how migration, informal survival, and neighborhood organization become foundations of durable political power. It connects the everyday practices through which people navigate economic and social uncertainty to the networks through which mass political organizations build and sustain popular support.

My research on health and crime extends this concern with place to questions of population well-being and public safety. I have studied how belonging, migration, and public health are contested in large-scale digital conversations, including research on vaccine hesitancy and representations of Syrian immigration, and have co-authored research examining the relationship between U.S. policy environments and population health and life expectancy. My work on crime examines how patterns of violence and safety vary across urban places and how those patterns intersect with the social organization of neighborhoods.

Across these projects, I combine spatial analysis, computational text analysis, demographic data, and qualitative research. My research has appeared in The Milbank Quarterly, Social Science Computer Review, European Politics and Society, PLOS ONE, and Sociology Compass. I also develop public-facing, data-driven tools that translate social research into accessible resources, including Karne and Suç Endeksi.

Contact: zeyd@koytak.com