Hande Eslen-Ziya
University of Stavanger
Department of Media and Social Sciences
hande.eslen-ziya@uis.no
Hande Eslen-Ziya 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. She was awarded Associate Professorship in Sociology by the Turkish Higher Education Council (2015) and Young Outstanding Researcher award by the University of Stavanger (2020).
She has an established interest populism and its effects on science in Europe, anti-genderism and gender and social inequalities in higher education and online violence against academics, as well as social activism, and has a substantial portfolio of research in this field. Her research has been published in Gender, Work and Organisation, Emotion, Space and Society, 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. Currently she is working on both how right-wing populist ideologies by creating alternative troll-scientific discourses oppose the scientific facts and gender theory, and trolling and online harassment in Europe, focusing on academics’ coping strategies. The objective of this research is to explore online harassment addressing academics and find ways to increase scholars’ resilience by gathering best practices and unsuccessful experiences and drafting tentative guidelines to start dealing with this issue. This research is funded by the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS).
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 Control and published at Routledge, that looked at how illiberal regimes use discursive tools and governmentalities rather than actual public policies to foster human capital. She also co-edited the book titled The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication published at Amsterdam University Press. Her recent co-edited book is titled Populism and Science in Europe (2022, Palgrave Macmillan) which provides a systematic and comparative analysis of the intersections of populism and science in Europe, from the perspective of political sociology. Dr. Eslen-Ziya is Professor of Sociology at the University of Stavanger and director of the Populism, Anti-Gender and Democracy Research Group at the same institution. She has been appointed as the Honorary Research Associate at Gender Justice, health and human development at DUT, Durban University of Technology (2023 – 2026).
