Cemre Azizoğlu
Research Areas: Turkish Politics, Social and Cultural Studies, Everyday Life
Azizoğlu’s research is about living alone. In this respect, her project focuses on how one-person households start to live alone, how they experience the condition of living alone, and what their future expectations are related to their living arrangement. She has three main areas of inquiry: pathways, experiences, and future expectations. For data collection, she has conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with people who live alone or have lived alone.
E-mail: cemre.azizoglu@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. M. Nedim Karakayalı
Emine Bademci
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, Comparative Welfare States
In her dissertation, Bademci aims to explore the ideas and interests behind employers’ attitudes toward active labour market programs (ALMPs). She focuses on the politics of employers’ participation in ALMP in Türkiye and explores how welfare regimes, as the overarching institutional context, structure employers’ ideas and interests. She studies the extent to which employers participate in ALMPs (from fully implementing to ideologically opposing) and how their behaviour is defined by the welfare regime in Türkiye. By doing so, she investigates how national welfare regimes spin powerful policy feedback effects on the “policyscapes,” which shape employers’ attitudes toward public policies.
E-mail: bademci@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. H. Tolga Bölükbaşı
Ahmet Tarık Bıyıklıoğlu
Research Areas: Public Policy, Comparative Welfare States, Comparative Politics
Bıyıklıoğlu’s research intersects comparative welfare states, public policy, and disability studies. His master’s thesis analyzed how disability policies in the United States and Türkiye create disparate outcomes between veterans and civilians, with particular focus on access to essential assistive technologies such as prosthetics. Building on this foundation, his Ph.D. project aims to examine how public policies, as institutions, contribute to and shape health inequities across different contexts.
E-mail: a.biyiklioglu@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. H. Tolga Bölükbaşı
Batıkan Bulut
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, Migration and Civic Engagement
Bulut’s dissertation project focuses on civic engagement patterns of the Turkish-German youth generation to shed light on the immigrant-origin youth in the diaspora and their participation in civic life. His study aims to examine the relationship between these practices and civic engagement by looking at the volunteering activities and association participation of the young generation, who did not witness the experiences of the second-generation immigrants in Germany but learned and grew with them.
E-mail: batikan.bulut@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Asst. Prof. Meral Uğur Çınar
Can Çelik
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Social and Cultural Theory, Militarism and Nationalism
Çelik’s dissertation focuses on the Turkish military culture and its everyday life representations through its masculinity understanding. His research interests include cultural geography, military culture, and social movements.
E-mail: can.celik@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Prof. Alev Çınar
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Research Areas: Political Theory, Turkish Politics, Contemporary Islamic Political Thought
Murat Elmacıoğlu is currently working towards her dissertation on diverse understandings of the concept of civilization in the contemporary Turkish Muslim intelligentsia within the context of urban life and community building. Her research interests include Turkish political thought, civilizationism, politics of space and religion and modern Turkey.
E-mail: nur.murat@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Prof. Alev Çınar
Egesu Sayar
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Social and Cultural Theory, Collective Memory
Sayar studies protest narratives of contemporary student movements in Turkey. By relying on analyses of their repertoires of contention and collective memory, their claims-making, demanding, and framing processes for democratic participation are the main focus of her study, including the cultural dimension in their constitution of collective identity.
E-mail: egesu.sayar@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Asst. Prof. Meral Uğur Çınar
Pınar Dilan Sönmez Gioftsios
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, Nationalism and Citizenship
Sönmez Gioftsios’ PhD study explores lived citizenship experiences of highly-skilled EU and non-EU migrants in Hungary and Greece, focusing on intersections and interrelations between formal and informal sites of citizenship. It aims to map out legal/political, socio-economic, cultural, and emotional experiences of being a citizen through the use of the mixed methods-grounded theory design to offer an analytical framework to the concept of lived citizenship.
E-mail: dilan.sonmez@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Ioannis N. Grigoriadis
Hande Tuhanioğlu
Research Areas: Political Theory, Social Theory, Cultural Studies
On the basis of the examination of work in making sense of and reproducing social relations, Tuhanioğlu aims to understand the contemporary meaning of work by focusing on workers’ understanding of life through their work, the life practices reproduced by work, and the possibilities of change in labor processes with the availability of new technologies.
E-mail: hande.tuhanioglu@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. M. Nedim Karakayalı
İsmail Yazıcı
Research Areas: Turkish Politics, Political Theory, Comtemporary Islamic Political Thought
Yazıcı’s doctoral research centers upon the transformation of Cold War Islamism in Turkey, focusing on the influence of global Islamic revivalism on the political thought of the Turkish Muslim intelligentsia.
E-mail: ismail.yazici@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Prof. Alev Çınar
Cansu Yetimoğlu
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, Gender & Politics
Yetimoğlu conducts an explorative study of the gender-collective memory nexus by investigating collective memory constellations among female representatives in the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye. To contextualise the significance of the constitutive representation of women by illustrating what kind of a role collective memory plays when female parliamentarians engage in politics, Yetimoğlu conducts semi-structured, in-depth interviews with female representatives and thematic analysis of the speeches of female representatives.
E-mail: cansu.yetimoglu@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Asst. Prof. Meral Uğur Çınar
Didem Yılmaz
Research Areas: Social and Cultural Studies, Political Theory, Technologies of the Self
By focusing on the bodily construction of the self in the 18th century, Yılmaz is interested in how technologies of the self are regarded as various forms of biopolitics. At this point, she aims to elaborate on neo-Stoicism with the changing ontological reflections on the self through its transformative bodily practices and body as a field of multiple possibilities.
E-mail: didem.yilmaz@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. M. Nedim Karakayalı
Fatma Yol
Research Areas: Comparative politics, Turkish politics, Gender Politics
Yol’s dissertation focuses on women’s substantial political representation within the Turkish context. In her research, she conducts discourse analysis on the speeches by female parliament members addressing women’s issues in the Parliament.
E-mail: fatma.yol@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assist. Prof. Meral Uğur Çınar