Dr Hamide Elif Üzümcü
IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2024 - July 2025
Home institution: University of Padua
Hamide Elif Üzümcü is a social scientist whose work is broadly located in childhood and family studies, particularly in intra- and intergenerational family relationships and narrative methodologies. Before joining the IASH research community at the University of Edinburgh, she collaborated as a postdoctoral research fellow in a multinational project and taught the course Sociology of Cultural Processes at the University of Padua in Italy, where she was awarded a PhD cum Laude in Social Sciences in 2021. Her doctoral research on children’s intrafamilial privacy, conducted through long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Türkiye, earned her the Turkish Social Sciences Association’s Young Social Scientist Prize in 2023. Outputs from her research have been published in the journals Children & Society and Families, Relationships and Societies. Dr Üzümcü is also author of sociological fiction ‘Chronicles of Constrained Negotiations.’ On the board of the International Sociological Association’s RC53 Sociology of Childhood research committee, she acts as the Communications Manager.
Project title: Storytelling and Imaginal in Sufism: Narratives of Islamic Environmental Ethics from Children and Parents in Sufi Families
Dr Üzümcü’s research will explore the Sufi perspectives on morals of socio-ecological interactions through narrative interviews with children and their parents. Sufism (tasawwuf), a mystical and esoteric Islam, offers an ‘ethics of the environment,’ that considers the environment as a reflection of the Oneness of Being (tawhid). This holistic view of the environment is often negotiated by Sufi families and children through the Islamic culture of storytelling. The research contributes to the archiving and documentation of Sufi stories through the collection of contemporary Islamic environmental anecdotes and sayings from the everyday lives of Sufi families. It also seeks to enhance sociological understandings of how the environment is viewed through this cultural outlook, theoretically advancing relational frameworks.
In researching with children, the study employs arts-based methodologies. Workshops will be held with Sufi children, stimulating their imaginal -a concept derived from Sufi tradition- to express their perspectives on environmental ethics through story design techniques. These workshops will provide creative platforms for narration, helping to develop the concept of imaginal. Digital exhibitions of the children’s written and drawn stories will bring their voices to the public, making the research an engaging contribution to empirical studies with children.