William and Sally Searle Research Fellow
About
My current research project examines how anti-gender politics and epistemologies are reshaping academia in Turkey, particularly the institutional and epistemic conditions of critical gender studies. It explores how feminist and queer scholarship is displaced, delegitimized, or reconfigured within universities, while also asking how scholars continue to produce, circulate, and expand critical knowledge under these pressures. Based on interviews with academics working in the field of gender studies in Turkey, as well as editors involved in feminist and queer academic publishing, the project investigates the strategies through which critical gender scholars sustain scholarly practices, build solidarities, and create alternative spaces for knowledge production. Rather than approaching anti-genderism only as a repressive force, the project analyzes it as an epistemological project that claims epistemic authority over gender and seeks to redefine what counts as legitimate knowledge in academia. At the same time, it highlights the resilience and transformative capacity of feminist and queer scholarly communities.
Demet Bolat is the inaugural William and Sally Searle Research Fellow as part of the Institute for the Humanities Scholars in Exile program.
