We are delighted to welcome Dr. Tahire Erman as a Mercator Fellow in the Research Unit Voluntariness for the summer semester of 2026! She will be a visiting scholar at the University of Erfurt in April and May 2026 and will support our work in the areas of voluntariness, migration, and activism.
Tahire Erman focuses her studies on the intersection of housing, migration, and gender. Trained initially in environmental psychology at the City University of New York, she later shifted toward urban geography, where her work engages with critical approaches to space and the city.
Her work examines how housing regimes, urban transformation, and displacement and relocation are experienced and negotiated in everyday life. She is currently conducting research on refugee spaces and subjectivities particularly with regard to multiple inequalities embedded in housing regimes and urban contexts.
Her research adopts an intersectionality approach, drawing on critical urban theory, feminist geography, and socio-spatial perspectives. More recently, her work has foregrounded postcolonial scholarship in refugee contexts to explore the multiple framings of the other woman, with a focus on gendered moral economies of care, volunteering, and intersecting inequalities of race, class, and gender.
Her points of intersection with the research group lie primarily in regional and global migration dynamics and their effects on migrant communities. Similar to the subprojects of Florian Wagner and Carsta Langner, she is particularly interested in what sense people act voluntarily or not and also in the role of women within it. Specifically, the current project explores gendered selfhood of care and racialized subjectivities in refugee voluntarism. We will also discuss the extent to which migration can be voluntary at all as part of our lecture series. There, Tahire will participate in a panel discussion on June 3, 2026, alongside Pierre Jérome Monforte from UIC Barcelona and Florian Wagner. We look forward to Tahire’s contributions to our work in the research group and to a great collaboration!
