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My first book, Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023 as part of its LSE International Studies Series. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Berlin and Istanbul-- where I worked as an undertaker-- Dying Abroad offers an ethnographic account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, vividly illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and identity in contemporary Europe.
"Meticulously researched and heartbreakingly told, Balkan's analysis of "death out of place" for Muslims of Turkish and Kurdish descent in Germany is original, important, and unforgettable." - Neda Maghbouleh, author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian - Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race "What happens to those who die "out of place"? Dying Abroad is a remarkable, eloquent, and extensively researched study in which Balkan demonstrates that death, dying, and posthumous acts of burial, bereavement, repatriation, and memorialization are contested processes for migrant Muslim communities in Europe, and constitute complex negotiations of social, political, religious, and cultural membership and belonging."
- Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four Continents |