Asst. Prof. METEHAN CÖMERT

Dr. Metehan Cömert is an Assistant Professor of Public Finance at the Faculty of Political Sciences, Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University. He earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled “Four Essays on Fundamental Issues of Public Finance: Fiscal Anthropology, the Gift, the Commons, and the Meci”. His research circles around fiscal anthropology, political economy, critical social theory, and anti-capitalist movements. In recent years, his research has concentrated on the creation, expansion and multiplication of interstitial movements running from the particular to ‘radically’ (if such a word can still be used without irony) change the world. His approach seeks to introduce new perspectives, drawing from everyday practices to construct alternative paths to liberation.

Through fieldwork conducted in Turkey’s northeastern region, he examined a centuries-old culture of mutual aid and solidarity, "meci", to question whether its ethos of gift and commons can be reclaimed as anti-capitalist imaginaries. The results of this research were published in Critical Sociology under the title “Challenging Capitalism Begins in Everyday Lives: The Culture of Meci, the Gift and the Commons” and later expanded into his book Meci: A Social Movement and Anti-Capitalist Possibilities, which situates these local practices within a broader theoretical reflection on emancipation and social reproduction.

In 2024-2025, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS), University of Hamburg, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Frank Adloff, where he explored how taxes could be reimagined through the anthropological perspective of the gift in the Anthropocene. He is currently developing a theoretical framework on the ontology of tax and the state, asking whether the state’s fiscal foundation can be reinterpreted beyond utilitarian logic, toward a relational, convivial, and existential understanding of the public. His work aspires to move beyond formulaic discourse, seeking instead a theory of authentic praxis that resonates with the immediacy and urgency of contemporary social life.