Populism, Gender and Discourses of Activism
Dilara Çalışkan
Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Dilara is an LGBTI+ rights activist in Turkey and a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received research grant awards from Social Science Research Council and the Wenner Gren Foundation. She is also a graduate student fellow of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. In 2014, she graduated from Sabancı University’s Cultural Studies Master’s Program with a thesis titled “Queer Mothers and Daughters: The Role of Queer Kinship in the Everyday Lives of Trans Sex Worker Women in Istanbul.” Her reviews and essays have been published in the American Ethnologist, the European Journal of Women's Studies, as well as edited volumes Queer Kinship (Duke University Press) and Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press).
Dilara chose a black-and-white photograph in reference to the main social media campaign to support the Istanbul Convention where women posted their photographs in black and white.