Thesis: Living on the Margins of Recognition: Turkish Cypriot Youth, Ascriptive Citizenship, and Resilience in an Unrecognised State
Supervisor: Professor Heather Hamill
I am a DPhil student in Sociology at St Cross College, University of Oxford.
My research explores how Turkish Cypriot youth navigate identity, citizenship, and belonging while growing up in a de facto, internationally unrecognised state. Through in-depth interviews and archival research in northern Cyprus, I examine how young people make sense of citizenship categories, legal ambiguity, and their position within overlapping political frameworks—including the de facto TRNC, the Republic of Cyprus, Turkey, and the broader international order.
By focusing on everyday experiences and shifting personal and communal attachments, my work contributes to the sociology of youth, affective citizenship, and durable inequality, offering insight into how contested sovereignties are lived, negotiated, and emotionally experienced in practice.
Outside academia, I have a strong interest in literature and cinema, and I hope to explore these creative fields further in the future.
Research Interests: Nationalism and ethnicity; political and civil violence; death, dying, and suicide; religion, religious groups, and secularisation; film and media studies
Previous Education: BA Economics & BA Sociology, Koç University; MSc Sociology, University of Oxford
