Dr. Öğr. Üyesi MEHMET FUAT KINA

Biyografi

I currently hold the position of Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department, and serve as the head of the Social Research Department of the Population and Social Research Institute at Marmara University. Before this, my journey included roles as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Computational Social Sciences and as an Instructor in the Computational Social Sciences MA program at Koç University, where I focused on research and teaching in computational social sciences, causal inference, social movements, and the comparative analysis of welfare systems and social policy.

My research path began in earnest in 2018 when I embarked on my doctoral studies, during which time I contributed to three significant research projects funded by the European Commission: the ERC-funded Emerging Markets Welfare, the ERC-funded Politus, and the Horizon Europe-funded Social ComQuant projects. These projects allowed me to engage with large-scale and pioneering research, laying a strong foundation for my academic career.

My academic journey commenced with a Bachelor of Economics from Boğaziçi University in 2015, followed by a master’s degree from İstanbul Şehir University in 2018. My master’s thesis delved into the statistical analysis of the interplay between anti-immigrant sentiments and labor precarity in Europe.

For my doctoral dissertation, I explored the interplay between radical rural movements and welfare policies in Brazil and India. This investigation proposed an analytical framework to understand how the governments of Brazil and India leverage social assistance programs to demobilize radical rural movements, and how this strategy is reversed in India, while successfully containing the Brazilian rural poor. To tackle case-specific reverse causality issues, I employed quasi-experimental methodologies in both contexts.