Hamide Elif Üzümcü is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Social Sciences University of Ankara (SSUA).

Dr Üzümcü is currently on research leave at the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World at the University of Edinburgh, supported by a TÜBİTAK 2219 International Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK) as an Associate Fellow for her research project ‘Construction of Islamic Environmental Ethics through Sufi Narrative Traditions in Family Life’. During her research stay, she is in residence as a Nominated Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

Before joining SSUA, Dr Üzümcü was based at the University of Edinburgh as an IASH–Alwaleed Postdoctoral Research Fellow, where she researched Sufi perspectives on the morals of socio-ecological interactions shared through the Sufi storytelling tradition within family relationships in the UK. Prior to this appointment, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on a multinational project in family sociology, conducting the UK fieldwork, and taught Sociology of Cultural Processes at the University of Padua in Italy, where she was awarded a PhD cum Laude (with Honours) in Social Sciences in 2021. Her doctoral research on children’s intrafamilial privacy, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Türkiye, was awarded the Turkish Social Sciences Association’s Young Social Scientist Prize in 2023. Throughout her research career, she has worked as a visiting researcher at several centres for childhood studies, including the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY) at the University of Sussex, the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) at the University of Edinburgh, and the Trinity Research in Childhood Centre (TRICC) at Trinity College Dublin. Among the external funding she has been awarded to support participation in international conferences, academic visits, scientific memberships, and the organisation of scholarly events are grants from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) Susan Manning Workshop Fund, the Arqus European University Alliance Mentoring Fund, the COST Action CA21143 Young Researcher and Innovator Conference Grant, the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network Development Fund, and the European Sociological Association PhD Summer School Funding. She currently serves as an editorial board member of Children & Society and as Communications Manager and Board Member of the International Sociological Association’s Sociology of Childhood Research Committee (RC53). Alongside her academic work, she continues to write sociological fiction; among these is the published story Chronicles of Constrained Negotiations.