Project Team

Aslı is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bremen Department of Intercultural Education. Her doctoral project, entitled “Empowerment Concepts of Women’s Movements in Turkey: A Foucauldian Analysis of Subjectification Through Websites” is supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation with a doctoral scholarship. She completed her M.A. in Political Science with the accompanying subject Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Heidelberg University as a DAAD scholarship holder (2013). She worked as a research assistant and coordinator in the project “Comparing women’s movements in different cities in Turkey” led by the University of Bremen Department of Intercultural Education (2014-2017). She was a researcher in the project “Gender Equality Actions in Turkey’s Higher Education” conducted in collaboration with Research Worldwide Istanbul and SU Gender, funded by RWI. She designed and coordinated the feminist Summer School “Women´s and Gender Studies in Turkey: The Past, Present and Future 2019” at the University of Bremen.

Gülru is an assistant professor researcher at the Sabanci University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender). She has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the City University of New York Graduate Center (2011). She conducts research and teaches classes on gender and politics with a focus on participatory and deliberative democracy, care ethics and gender equality. She has academic and on field experience designing and facilitating deliberative democracy initiatives. She is the co-coordinator of the Sabanci University team in EU GEARING-roles: Gender Equality Actions in Research Institutions to Transform Gender Roles (2019-2023). She previously worked with Aslı on the project “Gender Equality Actions in Turkey’s Higher Education” conducted in collaboration with Research Worldwide Istanbul and SU Gender, and funded by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute.

Olga is a postdoctoral fellow of the Academy in Exile at the Freie Universität Berlin and board member of the Off-University. She is also an international guest researcher at The Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at the Freie Universität. Olga has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Middle East Technical University (2007). She held many research and teaching positions in different universities, including Universität Bremen, İzmir University of Economics, J. W. Goethe-Universität, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Jagiellonian University of Krakow, and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is one of the lead educators of Massive Open Online Course titled “Dangerous Questions: Why Academic Freedom Matters?” collaborated with Scholars at Risk and the University of Oslo. Her recent project is focused on “the construction of masculinities in sports-playing young men with a Turkish background.” As a founding member of the LGBTIQ Working Group of Turkish Psychological Association, she worked closely with women and LGBTIQ organizations and activists from Turkey.

Selin is an affiliated researcher in two international collaborative research projects: Spaces of resistance. A study of gender and sexualities in times of transformation at Gothenburg University, Sweden, and ZARAH: Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century at Central European University, Austria. Selin has a Ph.D. in Comparative Gender Studies from CEU (2016). Her research concerns gender politics and equality struggles in Turkey from historical and transnational perspectives, with a focus on activist agendas, organizational forms, and strategies. Selin held visiting fellowships at Lund University, Gothenburg University and Vienna University, taught courses on interdisciplinary gender research, gender regimes, women’s activism, NGOs, and transnational feminism at CEU, Eötvös Lorand University and Gothenburg University. Her work and teaching is informed by her experience as a feminist activist for two decades in numerous organizations and initiatives in Turkey, Hungary, Sweden and internationally.

Collaborators:

Aslı received her B.A. in American Culture and Literature from Bilkent University and her M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of South Florida. Currently she is a doctoral candidate in the Gender Studies PhD Program at Sabanci University. During her doctoral studies, she received a fellowship from the Centre for Southeast European Studies at University of Graz. Her research focuses on volunteering, civil society, women’s organizations and feminist activism in Turkey. Her recent published work is: Aygüneş A., & Golombisky, K. (2020). “Shifting Subjectivities, Cultivating Safe Spaces: Mothers’ Perspectives on Women’s Virginity in Contemporary Turkey” Journal of Research on Women and Gender, 10(1), 23-42.

Tuğba is the project coordinator of the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Between 2018 and 2020 she worked as the project coordinator of the programme “Blickwechsel: Contemporary Turkey Studies”. Her academic interests include the intersectionality of critical research on racism, social inequality, gender and diversity with a focus on developments in Germany. She is a board member of the association Maviblau, a cultural platform dealing with (post-) migrant issues in Germany and fostering dialogue between Turkey and Germany on civil society level.

Caniş was born in Adapazarı in the winter of 1990. After a difficult adolescence, she got accepted to the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts Academy Painting Department. One month before starting her education she lost her grandmother and her cat in ten days in a row. She took part in various group exhibitions and opened her first personal exhibition, entitled “Yetiştiğim Yerler” (Places Where I Grew Up In). As part of this exhibition, she painted the streets of the 15 houses where she lived in over the 10 years she spent in her journey in Istanbul. She published the “Arabesk Fanzin” with Reyhan Polat during 2015-2018 which was later published as a book. She wrote articles and created illustrations for periodicals including, Calling Mag, Bant Mag, Rağmen Edebiyat Dizisi, Cumartesi Ertesi. She was expelled from her Masters’ education at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts Academy. Immediately after, she participated in the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts’ (IKSV) research and study program and she was pleased that she was expelled from the master’s degree. She participated in the “Workshop of Monuments Tombs and Traces of War” in Istanbul, funded by SALT and led by Onur Atay. During this workshop, she prepared drawings and short animations for the newspaper published by the workshop team and the website that is currently under preparation. Nowadays she lives in Büyükada, writes a comic book and prepares artistic books while she continues to move to different parts of Istanbul