Dr. Derya Özkaya

Derya Özkaya is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Southeast European Studies (CSEES) at the University of Graz. She received her Ph.D. in Political Sciences from the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin with her dissertation entitled “The Affective and Emotional Dynamics of Collective Action in Turkey's Gezi Uprisings and Their Aftermath” in November 2020. She is currently working on her first monograph on the political promises and also limitations of collectivization, politicization, and mobilization of emotions and affects in collective (in)action building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two cities of Turkey in 2016 and 2017. Her academic research interests are primarily centered on political emotions and affect, political ethnography of collective action and resistance, social movements and contentious politics, and collective memory with a particular focus on Turkey.

Özkaya holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University, Istanbul, and two bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Political Sciences from Istanbul Bilgi University. Before joining the CSEES, Özkaya has worked at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at Sabancı University as a teaching assistant. Then, she worked at the Centre for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at FU Berlin as a research associate in the research project “Political Participation, Emotion, and Affect in the Context of Socio-Political Transformations” at the collaborative research center Affective Societies funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) between October 2015 and September 2018.