Kürşad Atalay is a scholar in economics and Research Assistant at Aydın Adnan Menderes University/Turkey. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Ege University, İzmir. His doctoral dissertation, titled A Critical Analysis of the Conception of Nature in Economic Thought, examines how nature has been conceived in economic thought as a resource, an object of property, an input of production, and a form of capital.

His research focuses on the relationship between economic activity and nature, with particular attention to political ecology, extractivism, environmental justice and mining conflicts. In his doctoral work, he analyzed how economic conceptions of nature materialize in contemporary extractivist mining regimes through property relations, development discourses, the production of consent, and forms of resistance.

Kürşad was a Visiting Scholar at York University-Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change in Canada during the 2025-2026, where he conducted comparative research on the social impacts of gold mining in Turkey and Canada. Kürşad’s broader research interests include the role of local and Indigenous communities in decision-making processes, conflict-prevention mechanisms in contested resource governance, and the possibility of developing more just and participatory policy tools. He is also interested in how non-dualistic approaches to nature may reshape economic thought and economic activity.

He received a B.A. in Economics from Hacettepe University, Ankara, and an M.A. in Economic Policy from Marmara University, İstanbul. The master’s thesis examined the crisis of capitalism through the lens of Hyman P. Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis,

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