Notice Board

Please click here to join the webinar 

Dr. Gülden Özcan was a brilliant scholar, activist, colleague, friend, loving partner, and mother. She worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge prior to her untimely passing in May 2022. This panel brings together scholars and activists to discuss her important legacies both within and outside of the academy. 

Panelists include:

• Khadija Baker (Montreal-based, multidisciplinary artist of Kurdish-Syrian descent)
• Dr. Simten Coşar (feminist political scientist)
• Dr. Nisha Nath (settler woman of colour living in Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) and an Assistant Professor of Equity Studies at Athabasca University)
• Arturo Tejeda Torres (a PhD candidate in Cultural, Social and Political Thought at the University of Lethbridge). 

Khadija Baker is a Montreal-based, multidisciplinary artist of Kurdish-Syrian descent (born 1973 in Amuda, Syria). Baker immigrated to Canada from Syria in 2001; she completed her MFA studies at Concordia University 2012. She is a core member of the Centre for Oral History & Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia University. Her installations investigate social and political themes centered on the uncertainty of home as it relates to persecution, identity, displacement, and memory. As a witness to traumatic events, unsettled feelings of home are a part of her experience. Her multidisciplinary installations often combine textiles, sculpture, performance, sound and video, and involve participative storytelling and performance to create active spaces for greater understanding. Baker continues her research creation at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) at Concordia University.

Simten Coşar is a feminist political scientist (Ph.D. in Political Science, Bilkent University; MA, in Political Science, Bilkent University; BA, Political Science & International Relations, Boğaziçi University). Between 2007 and 2021 she researched and taught courses in University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, Northern Michigan University in the United States, and at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She has published on political theory, feminist politics, Turkish intellectual history, history of political thought in Turkey. In the English-speaking and reading world, she is the co-editor of Universities in the Neoliberal Era: Academic Cultures and Critical Perspectives (UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) (with Hakan Ergül), and Silent Violence: Neoliberalism, Islamist Politics and the AKP Years in Turkey (Canada: Red Quill Books, 2012) (with Gamze Yücesan-Özdemir). She has translated major texts in social sciences from English to Turkish, and from Turkish to English. Her most recent translation is Handan Çağlayan’s seminal work on the Kurdish women’s movement (Women in the Kurdish Movement: Mothers, Comrades, Goddess, Palgrave, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has been conducting research on feminist encounters in the neoliberal academia with a view to autoetnographic extensions. Coşar has been acting as the associate editor of Sampsonia Way magazine.

Nisha Nath (she/they) is a settler woman of colour living in Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) and an Assistant Professor of Equity Studies at Athabasca University.  In December 2020, alongside Dr. Gulden Özcan, Dr. Tarek Younis and Dr. Evan light, she began collaborating on a British Academy funded project on racial capitalism and security. She is also working on a manuscript on ‘The Letters’ with Drs. Davina Bhandar, Rita Dhamoon and Anita Girvan, and continues her work with Dr. Willow Samara Allen on a SSHRC-funded project on the settler-colonial socialization of public sector workers. 

Arturo Tejeda Torres (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Cultural, Social and Political Thought, situated in the Sociology department at the University of Lethbridge. He graduated BA in Social Psychology from the Autonomous University of Queretaro (UAQ) in 2014 and MA in Philosophy from the University of Guanajuato in 2017. Currently, his PhD research aims an analysis of discourse and ideology as it unfolds within the context of Facebook commentaries and the Mexican daily presidential conferences by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, surrounding the recent feminist protests against the increasing number of femicides in Mexico.