Digitally Lived Citizenship: role of social media for refugee integration

Talk by CDCI Visiting Fellow Hande Eslen-Ziya

Thursday 11 July 2019, 3-4pm.

In her talk, ‘Digitally Lived Citizenship: The role of social media for refugee integration in Norway, Sweden and the UK’, Hande Eslen-Ziya, who was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Digital Cultures and Innovation and the Responsible Futures, introduced her research on a new project she is developing in collaboration Flis Henwood, Professor of Social Informatics. This involved discussions of digital society and citizenship, issues around social media, and key questions about the role they can play for refugee integration in the UK and Nordic countries.

The 30-minute talk was followed by a 30 minute Q&A/discussion.

Hande Eslen-Ziya is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Social Sciences at the University of Stavanger in Norway. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland and an MA in Social Psychology from Bogazici University, Istanbul Turkey. She also has a Gender Specialization from Central European University, Budapest Hungary. In 2015, she was awarded Associate Professorship in Sociology by the Turkish Higher Education Council.

She has an established interest in gender and social inequalities, transnational organizations and social activism, and has a substantial portfolio of research in this field. Her research has been published in Social Movement Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Culture, Health and Sexuality, Leadership, Men and Masculinities, and Social Politics, as well as in other internationally recognized journals. Dr. Eslen-Ziya has also authored a book that investigates how men construct their identities throughout their developmental trajectories –titled The Social Construction and Developmental Trajectories of Masculinities—published at Istanbul Bilgi Universitesi Yayınları (2017) and another one entitled Politics and Gender Identity in Turkey: Centralized Islam for Socio-Economic Controland published at Routledge, that looked at how illiberal regimes use discursive tools and governmentalities rather than actual public policies to foster human capital. Currently she is one of the editors for the book titled The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication to be published at Amsterdam University Press. Dr. Eslen-Ziya is an Associate Prof. of Sociology at the University of Stavanger and co-chair of Digital Society Research Group.