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 which are 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
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: Assoc. Prof. Saime Özçürümez
Mine Çetin
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, Identity and Collective Memory
Çetin’s research aims to understand the political transformativeness of memory by conducting a qualitative study on the ways in which people who took part in active politics in different ideological groups in Turkey between the years 1960-1980 transfer their memories of this period to the next generations and the perceptions of the next generations about current politics within the framework of the transferred memory.
E-mail: mine.cetin@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. İlker Aytürk
Yiğit Erden
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, Social Cohesion
Erden’s dissertation aims to test Ronald F. Inglehart’s evolutionary modernization theory from cross-border mobility and migration. He identified Turkey and Germany as cases to be analysed under this project and chose Turkish citizens who lived in Germany for a certain period as a sample group. He mainly focuses on examining their changing values and attitudes towards migrants through a survey and interviews.
E-mail: yigit.erden@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Saime Özçürümez
Hatice Mete Dökücü
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, Populist Politics
Mete Dökücü’s research interests are public opinion, political parties, and comparative political behavior. In particular, her dissertation focuses on institutional factors as the causes of the party system and mass-level polarization in established and democratizing regimes.
E-mail: hatice.mete@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Prof. Aida Just
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Research Areas: Political Theory, Turkish Politics, Contemporary Islamic Political Thought
Murat 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
Ece A. Işık Canpolat
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, Public Policy in Turkey
In her dissertation, Canpolat focuses on understanding the reasons behind the democratic backsliding process by considering the countries where a leader cult had been created under the populist discourse by focusing on the structural factors that effecting such like process. In this respect, Turkey, Hungary, and Austria are being studied comparatively, where Austria has been taken as the control variable of the research.
E-mail: ece.isik@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Ioannis N. Grigoriadis
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. Saime Özçürümez
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
Burcu Türkoğlu
Research Areas: Comparative Politics, Turkish Politics, Critical Security Studies
In her dissertation project, Türkoğlu-Payne aims to conceptualise exceptional security within a conceptual framework beyond the norm-exception dichotomy. Her research challenges the essentialist logic of exceptionalism discussions by examining how juridico-politically distinct forms of exceptional security measures may have different kinds of politics involved in the decision-making.
E-mail: burcu.turkoglu@bilkent.edu.tr
Supervisor: Prof. Pınar Bilgin
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 and Politics in Turkey
In her doctoral dissertation project, Yetimoğlu is planning to focus on the sub-field of gender and politics in Turkey. She is currently in the process of reviewing the relevant literature in order to determine the specific research topic with respect to the doctoral dissertation.
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