I am Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and my current research, funded by Horizon2020, mainly concerns the activism of Kurdish migrant women in selected host European countries (France, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and the UK) in terms of artistic and cultural practices in both the language(s) of the host countries and the women’s native Kurdish language. I hold a PhD in Kurdish Studies from the University of Exeter, having studied Kurdish artistic and literary narratives in Turkish Kurdistan and its European diaspora.

I was a Postdoctoral fellow in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford where I also taught Kurdish to both students and academics for several years. Apart from several research posts at UK universities (Middlesex, Open, Manchester, City University of London, Oxford), I have undertaken a number of non-academic roles at Kurdish NGOs and women’s and refugees’ organisations, including the Refugee Action Centre, involved ethnographic and creative qualitative/quantitative research on Kurdish women living in Europe and Kurdish regions.

Thanks to this interdisciplinary work of interests, I have managed to have an international and interdisciplinary network, links and experience with civil society and NGOs in the USA, Europe and the Middle East. I am currently at the postproduction stage of my ethnographic documentary film “Anywhere on this Road: Letters to My Unborn Daughter” on Kurdish intellectual women in Europe and my own personal journey as a Kurdish woman migrant, shot in various cities in Turkish Kurdistan along with Germany, England and Sweden, and the film will be released in Autumn of 2021. My research interests are new social movements, Kurdish-related research from gender and anthropological perspectives, cultural production, and intellectual activity with a gendered lens.

I am particularly interested in visual and material culture, urban, digital and sensory ethnography. My most recent publication is Civil Society versus State (Palgrave Macmillan, Dec-2020). Other than that, some fascinating publications on “artistic existence of Kurdish women intelligentsia”, “Kurdish women’s everyday agency and power in native context”, “the academic scholarship on Kurdish women captured with neo-colonial and orientalist approach”, through the lens of postcolonial and feminist rhetorical criticism are forthcoming this year, just delayed due to pandemic.