Özlem is a former Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and the research, funded by Horizon2020, mainly concerned the activism of Kurdish migrant women in selected host European countries (France, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and the UK) in terms of their artistic and cultural practices.

She holds a PhD in Kurdish Studies from the University of Exeter, having studied Kurdish artistic and literary narratives in Turkish Kurdistan and its European diaspora. She was also a Postdoctoral fellow in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford where she 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), she has 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. She is currently at the postproduction stage of her ethnographic documentary film “Anywhere on this Road” on Kurdish intellectual women in Europe and her own personal journey as a Kurdish woman migrant, shot in various cities in Turkish Kurdistan along with Germany, England and Sweden.

Her research interests are new social movements, Kurdish-related research from gender and anthropological perspectives, aesthetic and cultural practices, and intellectual activity with a gendered lens. She is particularly interested in visual and material culture, urban, digital, and sensory ethnography.

Link to BIO