About

Ege Selin Islekel is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and an Affiliated Faculty Member of Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas A&M University. Her work focuses on 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Post-Foucauldian Biopolitics, and Decolonial Feminisms. She specializes in critical approaches to the politics of death, especially in relation to collective memory and epistemic responses to contexts of overwhelming presence of death. Her research investigates epistemic and political resistances through collective acts of mourning in Turkey and Latin America. Her first book, Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance, forthcoming with Northwestern University Press in Spring 2024, explores these themes. She is also working on her second book, Monstrous Visions: Mechanisms of Defense and Regimes of Visibility, which provides a decolonial genealogy of monstrosity and analyzes how the notion of danger renders racialized modes of death invisible. Additionally, she is the co-editor of Foucault, Derrida, and the Biopolitics of Punishment (Northwestern University Press, 2022). Her articles have been published in various journals including Foucault Studies, Philosophy Compass, Theory&Event, Hypatia, CLR James Journal, philoSOPHIA, and Philosophy Today, as well as in anthologies such as Turkey's Necropolitical Laboratory and Cinsiyeti Yazmak.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• History
• Epistemology
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Cognitive psychology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Special Section: Contributions from the Foucault Circle

  Foucault Studies · 2025-03-01

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• Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy

  Constellations · 2025-09-16

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• Nightmare Remains

  Northwestern University Press eBooks · 2024-08-23

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• “We Come Together for Truth”

  2023-08-08

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  This chapter investigates practices of truth that take place in coalitional models of political subjectivity with respect to the task of political space making. It focuses specifically on mothers’ movements in Turkey and Argentina (Cumartesi Anneleri and Las Madres de Plaza De Mayo), movements that are formed on claims to truth with respect to enforced disappearances: in the absence of archival records, mothers’ movements are formed on the basis of establishing truth through long-durational coalitional activisms in public spaces, through regularly coming together ‘for truth’ by creating contested political spaces. The main aim of the chapter is to take the mothers’ movements seriously in the account of their actions and thus investigate their common interest in reinventing political spaces through coalitional practices of truth. What does it mean to create truth together? How does one invent truth, and how does one do so in relation and in coalition with others? What kind of an invention is at stake in such truth? How are spaces, specifically, political spaces born in relation to practices of truth?

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• Genealogies of Nothing: Enforced Disappearances, Fable Lives, and Archives in Erasure

  Foucault Studies · 2023-08-01 · 3 citations

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  Abstract: This article investigates the political impact of collective story-telling practices in the enforced disappearances from a Foucauldian perspective. I utilize two main theoretical frameworks: on the one hand, that of necropolitics, a kind of power that works on the management of death. On the other hand, that of genealogy as a type of history that mobilizes subjugated knowledges. The first part situates these stories within the framework of genealogy: subjugated knowledges that are buried and disqualified as a part of the work of necropolitics. The second part argues that a Foucauldian genealogical approach to these stories is insufficient: necropolitical archives, when they testify to the work of power, remain incomplete at best and actively erase more often. The third part analyzes these stories as examples of critical fabulation. What is at stake in the insistence of the people searchers to tell their stories, I argue, is the collective emergence of another kind of fable – an act of fabulation in line with what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” which multiplies the possibilities of the present and the past by precisely telling stories of ‘nothing.’

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• Gender in Necropolitics: Race, sexuality, and gendered death

  Philosophy Compass · 2022 · 14 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  Abstract This article focuses on gender in the theoretical framework of necropolitics. To this end, I first articulate the role of gender in Mbembe's own account, and then explicate necropolitics as a conceptual tool that accounts for the overwhelming presence of death in contemporary politics. Gender is an undertheorized element of Mbembe's account of necropolitics; as it takes a secondary role while accounting for racial and (post)colonial violence. Nevertheless, necropolitics provides a helpful tool of analysis for gendered violence, and specifically gendered death. Through situating gendered death within the framework of necropolitics, we can move from power to resistance with respect to the contemporary politics of death, and articulate how other politics of death are formulated in transnational feminist, queer, and trans movements. Thus, necropolitics as a conceptual tool is helpful in understanding how contemporary colonial gender system works through not only an articulation, but optimization, of death.

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• Foucault and the Biopolitics of the Penitentiary:

  Northwestern University Press eBooks · 2022-04-15

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• Traveling the Soil of Worlds: Haunted Forgettings and Opaque Memories

  Hypatia · 2020 · 12 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Aesthetics

  Abstract This essay works on the role of trauma and forgetting in the subjective formations of the world-traveler and la nueva mestiza . I investigate how forgetting affects the resistant capacities of these figures. I argue throughout that the memory of the world-traveler is an opaque memory, which is unintelligible for the hegemonic demands of transparency, and which forms the silt upon which the resistant possibilities of the world-traveler rest. The first part elaborates María Lugones's conception of world-traveling in relation to Gloria Anzaldúa's New Mestiza consciousness and Mariana Ortega's multiplicitous self. Here I draw attention to the role of opacity and forgetting in the ways in which one can inhabit a world. The second part develops the notions of trauma and haunting to establish the experiential memory of the world-traveler not as a traumatic rupture, but rather as a haunted memory that accompanies her travels. The last section turns to Édouard Glissant's notion of opacity as a resistant mechanism, which works not through the traumatic rupture of experience but rather through sedimentation of experience.

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• Nightmare Knowledges: Epistemologies of Disappearance

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2019-11-01 · 2 citations

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  This chapter develops a conception of necropolitics as a power/knowledge assemblage by focusing on the games of truth and regimes of knowledge produced around death in the cases of mass graves and disappearance in Turkey. In particular, I am interested in the relations drawn between death, memory, and knowledge in necropolitical spaces, in spaces where life and the living are subsumed under the active production, regulation, and optimisation of death. The chapter consists of three parts: the first part analyses the relation between necropolitics and knowledge production, in order to establish necropolitics not only as a political technology, but also an epistemic one. The second section investigates the specific techniques of knowledge deployed in necropolitics, i.e., necro-epistemic methods, which target the temporal and logical coherence of memory in necropolitical spaces. The last section focuses on the practices of epistemic resistance, which work through mobilising perplexing realities in order to instigate counter-discourses. Overall, I argue that these counter-discourses, which I call ‘nightmare-knowledges,’ constitute necropolitical spaces as spaces of epistemic agency.

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• TWELVE / Nightmare Knowledges: Epistemologies of Disappearance

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2019-10-20

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