Özge Savaş

On March 28, 2017, eight graduate students joined the Barbour Scholar community. The new cohort, accompanied by their faculty advisors and several Barbour alumnae, celebrated their inclusion into this prestigious group and shared their research interests over lunch. The annual event, designed to welcome the newest class of scholars, is inspired by a long tradition of community gatherings and engagement that emerged in the early years of the scholarship. This year, the luncheon also marks the first major event in a series to celebrate the Barbour Scholarship Centennial.

Özge Savaş (Turkey) is a Ph.D. candidate in Psychology and Women’s Studies. Her dissertation focuses on the narratives of displacement and the experience of being a refugee. Refugees are portrayed and understood as those who disrupt and exist outside of established political, legal, and social orders, while most of the time it is the social order, policies and regulations that fail them. Through in-depth interviews with those resettled within the last year and those resettled three to five years ago in Southeast Michigan, she will examine the ways in which refugee women adapt to the country of refuge with a special focus on how things change over time. In particular, she is interested in how women negotiate their gender and ethnic identities in a new environment, and how they are affected by certain policies and regulations, as well as social attitudes.

Read the full article on the Rackham Website.