Birgan Gokmenoglu is Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University. She is a political ethnographer who works on transformative grassroots politics, theories and experiments of democracy, social justice, environmental politics, and time and temporality. She holds a PhD in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics (LSE). Her work has been published in academic journals such as The British Journal of Sociology and Social Movement Studies.
Derya Özkaya is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Southeast European Studies (CSEES) at the University of Graz. Her academic research interests are primarily centered on the politics of affect and collective emotions, social and political change through protest and grassroots organizations in particular, urban movements, collective memory, political ethnography, and contemporary politics of Turkey. She received her Ph.D. in Political Sciences from the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin and her Master’s degree in Cultural Studies at Sabanci University, Istanbul. Currently, she is working on her first monograph that critically analyses the political promises and limitations of collectivization, politicization, and mobilization of emotions and affects in mass mobilization and protest movements during and in the aftermath of Turkey’s Gezi uprisings of 2013 building on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two cities in 2016 and 2017.
