She got her B.A degree from the Sociology and the Psychology departments at the same university in 1990, and pursued her graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley in the USA and got her M.A and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Anthropology at this university in 1997. Since then, she taught at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, and at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford Universities in the USA. Her research and teaching interests include urban anthropology; political anthropology; material culture studies; sociological and anthropological theory; space, power and gender; environment and society.