Prof. Dr. Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe is an architect, anthropologist, urbanist, and gender studies scholar. Diversity, sustainable ways of knowing, and societal changes are central processes that she deals with in research, teaching, and practice.
Previously, Aylin Tschoepe gained experience as an architect involved in public and private projects (Dipl.-Ing. 2003, MSc in Universal Design 2007; FH Frankfurt/TU Istanbul). In the Doctor of Design program, she pursued her research interest in the social agency of architecture and the nexus between socio-cultural and spatial transformation at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2008 – 2012). To further deepen inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives on urban lifeworlds, Aylin Tschoepe studied, researched, and taught in the PhD program in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies with a Second Field in Gender Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2011 – 2018; fieldwork in Turkey: 2014 – 2016). As a postdoctoral researcher, she contributed with her expertise in urban ethnography, participatory design processes, and urban activism to the SNF project “Visual Communication in Participatory Urban Planning Processes,” a cooperation between the Institute of Visual Communication at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design and the Seminar for Cultural Anthropology at the University of Basel (2018 – 2021). In 2021, she became a senior teaching and research associate at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Basel. There, she has gained further experience in feminist theory and pedagogy.
Aylin Tschoepe’s current research addresses the entanglements of en/gendered bodies and urban spaces, as well as the material and immaterial implications of the continuous making and unmaking of body-spatial relations. With a focus on archival bodies as interfaces in the context of negotiating queer futures, she studies these relations and interfaces engaging multimodal, spatial, and sensory ethnography.
With her knowledge and experience in anthropology, architecture, urban studies, queer and performance studies, Prof. Dr. Aylin Tschoepe contributes to the Bachelor Program Interior Design and Scenography, to the Master Studio Design, to the PhD program, and to various research projects at the HGK. In particular, Aylin Tschoepe is interested in topics such as urban, invisible and ephemeral scenographies, design and urban anthropology, critical pedagogical approaches, as well as discourses on spatial, social and ecological transformations.
