Ülker Sözen
Associate Fellow
![Portrait of Ülker Sözen](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.irgac.org%2Fuploads%2Fuelker_photo_irgac_website_e69da32a9b.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
Ülker Sözen received her PhD degree in Sociology in 2017 from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Turkey. She was a postdoctoral fellow from 2019 to 2022 at IRGAC affiliated with Alice Salomon Hochschule, wherein she conducted research on civil society and authoritarianism in Turkey. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Religious Studies at Leipzig University, studying expressions of religiosity by Turkish youth on social media. She will start as a postdoctoral researcher in the project titled “Platformization, Forms of Authoritarianism, and the Future of Democracy: Perspectives from the Global South” at Passau University in May 2024.
Theory & ResearchThis essay intends to shed light on the emotional life of activists and dissident publics in contemporary Turkey along with producing insights to cultivate a coping perspective against the persistence of authoritarianism and the social polarization that it breeds, which poses a critical challenge to counter-hegemonic projects
By Ülker Sözen