Dicle Taskin

PhD Student
Programs

Ph.D. in Architecture

Dicle’s research focuses on the Pan-American Highway project and questions how this infrastructure shaped the imaginary of hemispheric integration. With the emphasis on politics of scale and (re)presentation, her dissertation analyzes how the Pan-American Highway project extended beyond the framework of Pan-Americanism and became a medium through which conflicting discourses and aspirations were articulated. Through a mixed methods approach which combines archival research and mapping, Dicle traces how these conflicting discourses translated into an ambiguous, illegible, and incomplete material infrastructure, which still determines the processes of urbanization and resource extraction, crosses heavily policed borders and influences patterns of migration, and functions as a medium through which new promises and national aspirations are articulated.

Dicle received her B.Arch from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and M.Arch from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. She worked as a research and teaching assistant at the same institution within the research group Habitar, focusing on the production of filmic spaces and invented realities. She started her doctorate degree at the University of Michigan in 2016, as a grantee of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program.

Awards

  • 2021 Rackham International Research Award (U of M)
  • 2021 Helen Wu Award (U of M)
  • 2020 LACS Tinker Field Research Grant (U of M)
  • 2016 Fulbright Foreign Student Scholarship (Turkey)