He was born in 1976. His family is originally from the village of Karaçam (Yukarı Ögene) in the Çaykara district of Trabzon. He completed his elementary and high school education in Bayburt, and his university education in Istanbul at Istanbul University. He earned his Master’s degree (2000) in the Department of Social Structure and Social Change and his Ph.D. (2006) in the Department of Sociology at the Institute of Social Sciences of the same university.

In 2006, he began teaching sociology courses at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Karadeniz Technical University. Four years later, he transferred to the Department of Sociology in the Faculty of Letters at the same university. At this stage, with a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Higher Education Council, he went to the United States to conduct research on the ethnic composition of America, migration, and integration as a visiting researcher at the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado. There, he carried out a seven-month theoretical and field study that included the Ahiska Turks in Denver. Upon his return to Turkey at the end of 2010, he was appointed as the Department Chair of Sociology and, over the following four and a half years (until February 2016), oversaw fundamental establishment processes such as the formation of the department’s academic staff and securing YÖK approval for undergraduate and graduate student admission files.

From July to September 2013, with a six-month overseas research fellowship provided by Karadeniz Technical University, and in order not to disrupt his studies, he spent three months during the summer break as a visiting researcher at the Department of Sociology of the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, conducting theoretical and ethnographic research. During this period, he had the opportunity to examine the tension between the nation-state and ethnic differences, as well as potential solutions, in Malaysia through theoretical, ethnographic, and practical means.

In 2017, from March 4 to July 31, he spent five months in the United Kingdom under a TÜBİTAK Postdoctoral Overseas Research Fellowship, He was invited to the University of Birmingham by Prof. Dr. Stefan Wolff, a leading global expert in his field, a faculty member in the Department of International Relations, and a political scientist, and under Prof. Wolff’s supervision, he conducted a theoretical study on the topic of “Kurds in Turkey and the Middle East.”

In addition to the book *City and Society*, which is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation and focuses on the subfields of urban sociology, economic sociology, political sociology, and ethnic sociology, the author has authored five original works—including a monograph on Malaysia, a professional monograph examining the contracting profession in Trabzon, and five original works . Alptekin also serves as editor of the HABİTUS Journal of Sociology as well as the TR-Indexed İMGELEM Journal, and holds the position of founding president of the BİLGİTOY Association, the umbrella organization that publishes these journals. He has authored approximately 70 articles, book chapters, and conference papers—published in various national and international journals—primarily focusing on global urbanization trends, urban transformation, capitalism, the ethnic structure of the Middle East, the process of social integration in the European Union, nationalism, nation-building, migration, diaspora, the nation-state, and ethnic differences, written in both English and Turkish. He continues his academic work at the Department of Sociology at Karadeniz Technical University (KTÜ) and teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses focused on the sociology of politics.