KHAS CORE Talks – Dr. Kristen Biehl and Dr. Özlem Aslan

KHAS CORE Talks series continues with Dr. Kristen Biehl and Dr. Özlem Aslan‘s speech entitled “Migration and Environment from a Gender Perspective: Examples from Civil Society in Turkey”.

You can follow the speech on Tuesday, March 22 at 20:00 on Zoom.

Please fill the registration form in advance.

Abstract: Kristen Biehl and Özlem Aslan will be sharing the findings of their latest report on gender perspectives of civil society organizations in the fields of migration and environment. Academic literature contains numerous studies on the ways that gender inequalities affect the direct subjects of migration movements and/or environmental disasters. However, there are only a limited number of studies examining gender awareness among civil society organizations working in these fields, whose numbers and influence have started growing exponentially over recent decades both globally and in Turkey. Moreover, there are seemingly no studies addressing migration and environment together, as they are often seen as separate topics both for research purposes and by civil society organizations. This research is thus shaped around two basic questions: How do civil society organizations working on migration and environmental issues in Turkey associate gender with their field of work, and how do they integrate gender awareness and equality both in the works they carry out and their organizational structures?  In what ways does a research project conducted around this question with an intersectional approach contribute to addressing migration, environment, and gender issues together? It builds on semi-structured interviews carried out with 30 NGOs (15 working on migration related issues and 15 working on environmental issues), all of which actively carry out rights-based works in Turkey and do not describe themselves as women and/or LGBTI+ organizations in their mission statements.

Dr. Kristen Biehl works as a research faculty member at Sabancı University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender). She received her bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology and Development Studies from SOAS University of London (2005), her master’s degree in Sociology from Boğaziçi University (2008), and her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Oxford University. She has been conducting both academic and professional research on migration to Turkey since 2006, working closely with many international, national and local public institutions, non-governmental organizations and different migrant/refugee groups. Her research centers on ethnographies of migration, diversification and urban change, governing effects of migration and asylum policy frameworks, and gendered impacts of migration. Her research on these subjects has been published in international peer-reviewed journals, including Ethnic and Racial Studies and Social Analysis. She is currently Principal Investigator of WHOLE-COMM and Re-ROOT projects in Turkey, which are both projects on migration funded by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Union. In 2019, Biehl began also working on the intersections of ecological struggles, the climate crisis and gender. This research report, of which she is the research coordinator, intends to bring together these different areas of interest.

Dr. Özlem Aslan works as a visiting scholar at Kadir Has University Core Program. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Toronto in June 2019. She also holds a degree in Women and Gender Studies from the same university. Her work focuses on the intersection of feminist geography, social movements, critical development studies, environmental studies, and critical space theory. In her doctoral study, she studied the anti-HPP movements as place-based struggles, introducing and theorizing their criticism of the established development discourse and practices from a place-based ethics. Her work has been published in journals, including History of Present, Feminist Studies and Feminist Approaches in Culture and Politics. She has been involved in the recent podcast series “K’nın Sesi” and is one of the founding editors and translators of the journal Feminist Approaches in Culture and Politics. She is one of the translators and editors of the book Feminist Tarihin Peşinde, which is a compilation of Joan W. Scott’s feminist discussions on history. Aslan is also conducting research at Istanbul Policy Center on climate-related disasters and rights-based approaches with the support of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute