Welcoming Aslı Elitsoy
It is our great pleasure to welcome Aslı Elitsoy as Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow to the research centre. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Bilkent University, Ankara, and her research interests include ethnicity, nationalism, migration, and Middle Eastern politics.
Aslı Elitsoy’s project will explore how different actors strategically utilize religious repertoires and practices to articulate their political subjectivities. The focus will be on alternative mevlid celebrations organized by rival factions within the Kurdish movement in Turkey to commemorate the birth of Prophet Muhammad. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the project will investigate how a local Islamic practice has become a contested political space in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish region, where rival nationalist interests and imaginaries compete for political dominance and legitimacy.
Aslı Elitsoy will start at the Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies on 1 September 2024.