Dr Özlem Belçim Galip

I am a former Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and the research, funded by Horizon2020, mainly concerned the activism of Kurdish migrant women in selected host European countries (France, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and the UK) in terms of their artistic and cultural practices.

I hold a PhD in Kurdish Studies from the University of Exeter, having studied Kurdish artistic and literary narratives in Turkish Kurdistan and its European diaspora. I was also a Postdoctoral fellow in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford where I also taught Kurdish to both students and academics for several years. Apart from several research posts at UK universities (Middlesex, Open, Manchester, City University of London, Oxford), I have undertaken a number of non-academic roles at Kurdish NGOs and women's and refugees' organisations, including the Refugee Action Centre, involved ethnographic and creative qualitative/quantitative research on Kurdish women living in Europe and Kurdish regions. I am currently at the postproduction stage of her ethnographic documentary film "Anywhere on this Road" on Kurdish intellectual women in Europe and her own personal journey as a Kurdish woman migrant, shot in various cities in Turkish Kurdistan along with Germany, England and Sweden.

My research interests are new social movements, Kurdish-related research from gender and anthropological perspectives, aesthetic and cultural practices, and intellectual activity with a gendered lens. I am particularly interested in visual and material culture, urban, digital, and sensory ethnography.

My ESRC funded research (2022-2024) titled "Empowering Women in the Fractured Cities: Developing capacity, advocacy, and partnerships in South-eastern Turkey" adopts an, interdisciplinary and participatory and creative arts-based approach to examine the gendered and intersectional implications of dispossession and displacement happened 2015 and 2016 in Turkish Kurdistan Involving a range of national and international public and private stakeholders, operating at the intersection of work on humanitarianism, colonial urbanism, urban conflict and forced displacement. It aims to generate empowerment and advocacy for affected women and girls, it also asks what effective services can be developed to provide much-needed immediate support for them?