CITY offers graduate students many opportunities and resources, among them: seminars, professional training workshops, conferences, membership status, work space and social activities. To learn more about the Institute, meet graduate students with similar interests, and learn how you can become involved reach us on city@yorku.ca.

PhD Candidate, Sociology

PhD Candidate, Social and Political Thought

Oded is a Vanier Scholar, whose interdisciplinary research combines critical urban theory, planning, and architecture, in order to examine the potential of public housing policy and design to alleviate ethnically conflicted urban areas. By comparing housing policy and design in Israel and Canada, his research looks at the planning and distribution of housing as fraught practices, with significant social, cultural and political consequences. He looks beyond the residents’ income, at issues such as gender, race, ethnicity and citizenship, in order to examine how cities accommodate different urban identities and cope with pressing conflicts between ethnic heterogeneity and exclusionary planning practices.


PhD Candidate, Department of Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies
Kathryn’s research examines how banlieue/suburb communities around Paris use various forms of cultural artifacts and texts – media clips, film, music, YouTube clips, graffiti and street art, among other in-the-moment, temporary modes of expression (graffiti, sticker-ing, unplanned art, and street musicians) – to counter discourses that work to stigmatize these places. Focusing on two banlieues in the Paris region, Hauts-de-Seine (92) and Seine-Saint-Denis (93), Kathryn’s research anchors a critical feminist framework that not only understands power and representation as overlapping, but also as inseparable, relational concepts and asks: if the ability to ‘represent’ is closely tied to power, then how can ‘opening up’ the kinds of artifacts used to represent banlieues reveal new perspectives on these places?

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology
Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz is a PhD candidate in Sociology at York University. His research interest is mainly in urban social theory -- specifically, 18th- and 19th-century German social and political thought, 20th-century French critical theory, and historical materialism. As an international student coming from Turkey, he also works on social movements and political-economy of the Middle East. Both in English and Turkish, his writings have appeared in edited scholarly books in the academic disciplines of geography, philosophy, and sociology. He is currently co-editing a theme issue for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space on "planetary urbanization."

PhD Candidate, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change
Murat's academic interests include global urbanization, neoliberal governmentality, studies on heterotopia and social exclusion in Istanbul. His research aims to examine how neoliberalism and neo-Ottomanist conservatism attempt to create a new urban hegemony in Turkey (essentially in Istanbul under the discourse of creating a global city) by excluding many people through the several tactics and strategies of the neoliberal governmentality.

PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology
Laura is a PhD student in Social Anthropology, with specializations in European Studies, gender/feminist theory, the anthropology of education and qualitative research methods. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation research is an educational ethnography of a teachers' college in southern France. In it, she considers what role the experiences of current and future teachers have in understanding state secularism and citizenship education, within the context of acute anxieties about the role of religion and diversity in contemporary Europe.

PhD Candidate, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology

PhD Candidate, Science and Technology Studies
Anna Artyushina is a sociologist and science and technology studies scholar. Her current research interests include smart cities, civic engagement, data governance policies, and responsible innovation. In 2020-2021, Anna serves as a science advisor in a range of government and non-profit organizations in Canada, including the Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada (ICTC).
Anna’s PhD project is a comparative study of two smart cities: the recently canceled Sidewalk Toronto (Canada) and the DECODE project in Barcelona (Spain). The publications, which came out of this project have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, e.g., Policy Studies, Telematics and Informatics, and the MIT Technology Review. Recently, Anna’s research on the history of innovation in Russian science has been featured in the BBC documentary “The remote 'democratic' oasis of Soviet Russia.”
Previous Graduate Affiliates

Pelin is a PhD Candidate in Critical Human Geography. Her research brings together literatures on the production of state-space, citizenship studies and the politics of infrastructure. She is interested in how politics of infrastructure shape state-citizenship relations especially in the context of rising authoritarianism. In this respect, her PhD research examines the recent rent-oriented urban development projects in Istanbul Turkey, including transformation of informal settlements and mega projects such as the new Istanbul airport. Pelin teaches courses on Urban Geography and Human Geography.

PhD Candidate, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change
Darren's research brings together queer theory, sociospatial theory, and urban political ecology as the basis for a queer/ed urban ecology. Broadly, his work is concerned with gentrification as an increasingly naturalized urban process. In this vein, queer urban ecology constitutes an attempt to counter capital-driven transformations of urban-natures (e.g. parks and public spaces). Through both critical and reparative gestures, Darren's work seeks to articulate an embodied agency sensitive to sexual difference and driven by desire. His work can be tracked at https://queerurbanecologies.wordpress.com and he's always up for taking a walk through Toronto's shifting urban landscape.