Dr. Öğr. Üyesi MEHMET FUAT KINA

I am currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Population and Social Research at Marmara University, where I also serve as the Head of the Department of Social Research. Previously, I held the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Marmara University and worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Computational Social Sciences at Koç University, where I also taught in the MA Program in Computational Social Sciences.

My research and teaching focus on computational social sciences, causal inference, social movements, and the comparative study of welfare systems and social policy.

My academic research career began in earnest in 2018 with the start of my doctoral studies. During this period, I contributed to three major 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 experiences allowed me to participate in large-scale, cutting-edge research and provided a strong foundation for my academic trajectory.

I earned my BA in Economics from Boğaziçi University in 2015 and completed my MA at İstanbul Şehir University in 2018. My master’s thesis employed statistical analysis to investigate the relationship between anti-immigrant sentiment and labor market precarity across Europe.

My PhD dissertation examined the relationship between radical rural movements and welfare policies in Brazil and India. I developed an analytical framework to explain how governments use social assistance programs to demobilize radical rural movements—successfully doing so in Brazil while failing in India. To address issues of reverse causality, I applied quasi-experimental methods in both cases.

I have published peer-reviewed articles in SSCI journals including New Perspectives on Turkey, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, The Developing Economies, and Asian Journal of Social Science, as well as several book chapters.