Research Projects

Ongoing and Completed Projects

REACH: Re-shaping Attitudes about Refugees and
Gender Minorities in Spain and Portugal (2025-2027)
The project aims to develop human rights-based public narratives about refugees and gender minorities in Spain and Portugal. Our goal is to provide stakeholders with empirically tested narratives to initiate constructive dialogues with their target audiences and counter the growing influence of the far-right in shaping public attitudes.

Funded by La Caixa Foundation Social Research Call

Grant amount: € 114,995

RESONATE: Designing Resonant Frames: How to Effectively Communicate about the Rights and Inclusion of Immigrants and Refugees? (2022-2024)

The project explored ways Turkey’s nascent immigrant and refugee rights movement. It combined novel research methods with insights from sociology, communication studies, and political science to map the network and capacities of the growing movement.

Funded by Horizon 2020, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship

Grant amount: € 269,000

CRAFT: Politicisation of Civil Society and the Judiciary in Turkey (2019-2021)

This research project investigated the lasting repercussions of the politicisation of nonpartisan institutions on state-society relations with an aim to explain how authoritarian governance takes root at institutional, civic and societal levels. Grounded in case study design, the project focused on 3 major issues: (1) dependent-CSOs and politicised associational sphere (2) a systematic measure of to what extent high courts’ judicial output reflects the incumbent’s interests and other non-legal variables (3) the implications of politicised judiciary and civil society on the EU-Turkey relations

Funded by Horizon Europe Marie Sklodowska-Curie European Fellowship

Grant Amount: € 178,157

Open Society Fellowship – Human Rights Cohort (2018-2019)

The project investigated how and why the associational sphere expanded amid a broad crackdown on the freedom of expression, association, and assembly in Turkey. It also researched the transformation of civil society and partisan mobilisation during the autocratisation process within the diasporic space.

Funded by Open Society Foundations

Grant amount: $99,250

Swedish Institute Fellowship (2017) This project analyzed the link between government-dependent civil society in Turkey and the bottom-up consolidation of authoritarian rule in Turkey. Based on grounded research and multi-sited fieldwork design, it investigated (a) the trajectory of the emergence of dependent CSOs, (b) their interaction with society/target groups and the government, and (c) their impact on the nature and role of civic pluralism.

Funded by Swedish Institute

Grant amount: SEK 216,000

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