Professor Elif Kalaycioglu research focuses on how plurality and diversity challenge and transform the world order and global governance. She investigates this question through a substantive focus on global cultural politics, and the case of UNESCO’s world heritage regime. She is also interested more broadly in the role that values, ideas, and expertise play in the conduct of global politics.
Research Areas:
Elif Kalaycioglu’s research focuses on how claims of plurality impact global order as it is pursued by governance regimes and international institutions. Her book project explores how questions of cultural diversity have been brought to the stage of UNESCO’s world heritage regime, challenging and transforming the regime’s grounds and goals, as a symptom and further entrenchment of a new global politics of culture. Her further research will explore the intersection of order, governance and plurality by exploring how the world heritage regime has become a conduit for the pursuit of multiple international, regional, and national political projects at a time of broad global political shifts. A second stream of her research starts from the world heritage sites themselves, and uses these concrete locations to think about how conflicting assertions of value, and visions of world order are staged in and through these internationally recognized places.
