About Me
I am a political scientist and working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Southeast European Studies (CSEES) at the University of Graz.
My research interests are primarily centered on the politics of emotions and affect, political ethnography of collective action and resistance, protest movements and contentious politics, collective memory, and contemporary politics of Turkey.
I am currently working on my first monograph on the emotional and affective dynamics of popular protests and collective action focusing on Turkey’s Gezi uprisings of 2013 and the post-Gezi political landscape in the context of anti-government protests and alliances. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two cities of Turkey - Istanbul and Eskişehir- and in-depth interviews and participant observation in 2016 and 2017, I critically analyze the political capacities and challenges of hope and desire for change, thrill and enthusiasm of resistance, collective sense of solidarity and belonging, shared grief and pain of loss, and many more that galvanized political actors into or precluded them from collective political action under Turkey’s authoritarian transformation.
Prior to joining the CSEES, I worked at the Centre for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at FU Berlin as a research associate in the research project “Political Participation, Emotion, and Affect in the Context of Socio-Political Transformations” at the collaborative research center Affective Societies funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) between October 2015 and September 2018. Before moving to Berlin, I also worked at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at Sabancı University as a teaching assistant.
I received my Ph.D. in Political Sciences from the Otto-Suhr Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin in November 2020. I hold an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University, Istanbul, and two bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Political Sciences from Istanbul Bilgi University.
My research interests are primarily centered on the politics of emotions and affect, political ethnography of collective action and resistance, protest movements and contentious politics, collective memory, and contemporary politics of Turkey.
I am currently working on my first monograph on the emotional and affective dynamics of popular protests and collective action focusing on Turkey’s Gezi uprisings of 2013 and the post-Gezi political landscape in the context of anti-government protests and alliances. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two cities of Turkey - Istanbul and Eskişehir- and in-depth interviews and participant observation in 2016 and 2017, I critically analyze the political capacities and challenges of hope and desire for change, thrill and enthusiasm of resistance, collective sense of solidarity and belonging, shared grief and pain of loss, and many more that galvanized political actors into or precluded them from collective political action under Turkey’s authoritarian transformation.
Prior to joining the CSEES, I worked at the Centre for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at FU Berlin as a research associate in the research project “Political Participation, Emotion, and Affect in the Context of Socio-Political Transformations” at the collaborative research center Affective Societies funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) between October 2015 and September 2018. Before moving to Berlin, I also worked at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at Sabancı University as a teaching assistant.
I received my Ph.D. in Political Sciences from the Otto-Suhr Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin in November 2020. I hold an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University, Istanbul, and two bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Political Sciences from Istanbul Bilgi University.