05/03/2026
Dr. Kristen Biehl-Öztuzcu, Assistant Professor at Sabancı University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, has been awarded funding under the TÜBİTAK 3501 Career Development Program for her project titled 'In Pursuit of a Better Life: Lifestyle Migration, Urban Families and Local Transformations'.
Dr. Kristen Biehl-Öztuzcu's project focuses on a form of mobility driven by the search for a "better life" rather than economic or political necessities, a phenomenon known in the literature as lifestyle migration.
While international studies mostly address this type of migration through the lens of retirees or individual professionals seeking prosperity, this research centers on urban families, which have become increasingly visible in recent years.
This project, focusing on Bodrum district in Türkiye, where families from metropolitan centers have concentrated in the last 10 years, examines the desires and values that shape families' migration decisions, their post-migration daily life and parenting practices, and the social and spatial transformations these practices create in Bodrum. Thus, lifestyle migration is considered both as an individual life project and as a social process that produces transformations on a local scale.
Accordingly, the study aims to analyze, within a qualitative research framework, how urban families create new lifestyles, encounters, and inequality dynamics through their daily life practices, shifting the focus from individual-centered migration narratives in the lifestyle migration literature to the family and parenting axis.
