School of Geography and the Environment

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.

Research Interest

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?

Books

• Galip, O.B. (forthcoming) Art, Gender and Migration in the Kurdish Diaspora: Intellectual and Cultural Production in Europe. I.B. Tauris, London.
• Galip, O.B. (2020) New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey: Civil Society vs. the State. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 221. ISBN: 978-3-030-59399-5.
• Galip, O.B. (2015) Imagining Kurdistan: Identity, Culture, and Society. I.B. Tauris. pp. 320. ISBN: 9780857738240.

Journal Articles

• Galip, O.B. (2021) From Mountains to Oceans: Prison Narratives of Behrouz Boochani. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 4(2): 1-15.
• Galip, O.B. (2021) Move Over? Feminist Reading of Academic Writing of Kurdish Women. Asian Journal of Women's Studies, 27(3): 161-183.
• Galip, O.B. (2021) Recognition of Power: The Agency of Kurdish Women in their Everyday Lives. European Journal of Women's Studies, 28(4): 353-378.
• Galip, O.B. (2019) The Reaction to and Representation of Armenian Genocide and Identity in Modern Turkish Novels. Turkish Studies, 20(1): 92-119.
• Galip, O.B. (2016) The Politics of Remembering: The Representation of Armenian Genocide in Kurdish Novels. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 30(3): 458-487.
• Galip, O.B. (2016) Writing Across Kurdistan: Reading Social, Historical and Political Contexts in Literary Narratives. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 9(3): 257-274.
• Galip, O.B. (2014) Where is Home?: Re-visioning 'Kurdistan' and 'Diaspora' in Kurdish novelistic discourse in Sweden. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 4(2): 82-90.

Book Chapters

• Galip, O.B. (2017) Kurdish Literature. In, Maisel, S. (ed.) The Kurds: An Encyclopedia of Life, Culture, and Society. ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara. pp. 163-189. ISBN: 978-1-4408-4256-6.