TEAM MEMBERS

I am a lecturer in the Core Program at Kadir Has University. I teach on ethics and political philosophy. My areas of interest are contemporary social and political philosophy, particularly theories of political freedom, social unity, and civic solidarity. I also work on applied ethics, largely on bioethics and the impact of recent human enhancement technologies on our understanding of happiness and the good life. I have recently received a career project grant from TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). With this research grant, I will have the chance to develop my work on the problem of social unity together with a team of enthusiastic Ph.D. and MA students.
I received my MA and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Philosophy at Boğaziçi University in İstanbul. In my MA, I worked on Philip Pettit and criticized his account of domination. In my dissertation, I worked on John Rawls and extracted a liberal theory of civic solidarity and social unity from his A Theory of Justice. I recently published two articles on social unity and solidarity: “Three Approaches to Social Unity and Solidarity,” CRISPP in 2019, and “Sources and Discourses of Solidarity: The Case of the Covid-19 Pandemic” in Jahrbuch Praktische Philosophie in Globaler Perspektive 5, Verlag Karl Alber in 2021. With the TUBITAK career grant, I continue to work on the problem of social unity and attempt to formulate a hybrid view. As part of the research project, I am also the editor of the Turkish translation of a collected volume on Liberal Nationalism.
I am an active member of SWIP-TR and the Association of Social and Political Philosophy in Turkey. I currently work in the academic and organization committees of their 2023 conferences. I am also the founding member of the emerging Turkish Analytic Philosophy Society.

Melih Can Kızmaz was born on October 20, 1995, in Sakarya. He completed his undergraduate degree at Sakarya University, in the Department of International Relations. He received his master’s degree from Istanbul Technical University Political Studies Program. His MA thesis is titled “Contemplating Climate Justice with the Natural Law: The Application of Climate Citizenship Through Public Policies”. He is currently a PhD student in the Social and Political Thoughts Program at Istanbul Technical University. His main areas of interest are political theory and climate justice.

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University. My dissertation will be titled “Comparison and Criticism of Bergson’s and Feyerabend’s Concepts of Philosophy and Science”. My areas of interest are philosophy of science, history of science, and political philosophy. I have received a grant from BiÇABA scholarship program and currently work as a project assistant at a TUBITAK project titled “What Unites a Society?” With this research project, I will have the opportunity to work on social solidarity and liberal nationalism.
My undergraduate and graduate degrees are both from Mersin University, Department of Philosophy. My undergraduate thesis is on “Positivism”, and MA thesis is on “Paul Feyerabend’s Place in the Post Positivist Process”. I published an article titled “Önyargı” (2017) in Aratos, a history, philosophy, culture, and art journal; and another titled “Yunus ile Nefs’in Terbiyesiyle Kendini Bilmek” (2021) in Felsefelogos.
I taught philosophy in various private high schools as well as working as a psychological counselor and school counselor. I also had administrative positions in the past and worked as a high school coordinator and high school administrator. In addition, I organized various seminars in cooperation with various non-governmental organizations, associations, and universities. To name a few: Post-earthquake Public Psychosocial Support in TOBB Diyarbakır Women Entrepreneurs (2023); Parent and Child Communication Seminar in Diyarbakır Sur Kızılay (2022), VIII. Philosophy Students in Turkey Conference (2008), Currently, I am writing my dissertation and working as a research assistant in the Social Unity Research Project.

Aslı Şentürk was born in 1993 in Gaziantep. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Economics at Gaziantep University. Her MA thesis in Economics is titled “Renewable Energy Sources in the Context of Sustainable Economic Growth: An Evaluation on the Case of the European Union (EU) and Turkey”. In 2020, she started her postgraduate education in the Department of Philosophy at Gaziantep University. She presented a paper titled “Wollstonecraft or Rousseau: Justifying a Non-Genderist Educational Philosophy” at the 7th National Symposium on Contemporary Political Philosophy in 2022. An expanded version of this presentation was co-authored with Muharrem Açıkgöz and published in Education, Justice, Economics: Educational Philosophy Discussions. In the same year, at the International Mythology Symposium, she presented a paper with Muharrem Açıkgöz on the “Challenge of Unconventional Women to Plato and Philosophy.” She is now an MA candidate and studies cosmopolitanism. She has received a grant from TUBİTAK BiÇABA scholarship program. She worked as a project assistant between April 2023- August 2023.

I graduated from Hacettepe University, Department of Social Work, with a minor in Sociology in 2018. Then, I completed the Philosophy master's program at Istanbul 29 Mayıs University in 2021 with my thesis titled "Another Critique: Michel Foucault's Philosophy of Critique". I am currently continuing my doctoral studies at Hacettepe University, Department of Philosophy. I work as a research assistant in the same department. My main areas of research include contemporary French philosophy, philosophy of social sciences, philosophical methodology, and political and social philosophy.

I co-edited Why Do Architects Read Bachelard? (Ketebe, 2021) and translated Srećko Horvat’s book Poetry from the Future (Kolektif, 2021). My recently published academic studies include “Michel Foucault (Doesn’t) Read the Oresteia: Tragedy, Justice, Truth” (Theories of Justice, Çizgi, 2024, pp. 417-440) and “The Axiom of Equality: Jacques Rancière’s Imagination of Democracy” (Kaygı, no. 22, 2023, pp. 623-647) are located. Among the books that I have helped prepare for publication in Metis Publications’ French non-fiction series are O. Roy’s The Flattening of the World (Metis, 2024), F. Guénard’s The Passion for Equality (Metis, 2024), and J. Rancière’s Journeys of Art (Metis, 2024).  

My name is Yaren Kılıç. I graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Middle East Technical University in 2023. During my undergraduate studies, I was an active member of ODTÜ Oyuncuları, the university's theater group, which deepened my interest in the intersection of philosophy and art. My paper, "Art, Artificial Intelligence, and Meaning," was published in the third issue of Prokopton, Bilkent University's Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy.
Currently, I am pursuing a master's degree in philosophy at Boğaziçi University. My research interests include art ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy.

Zahide Özdemir is a master student in the department of Political Science and Public Administration at Kadir Has University. She has a double major in her bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Psychology from Maltepe University in Istanbul. Her undergraduate thesis was field research called “Refugee Art Collectives and Initiatives in Istanbul” which focused on the relations between NGOs and local collectives/organizations in terms of their strategies of survival. She worked as a project assistant in the organizational committee of international student congress “MUISC-2017, Migration as a Global Problem” at Maltepe University. She also worked as a project assistant in a project titled as “Earthquake and Women: Identification, Investigation and Solution Suggestions for Disaster Risk Reduction and Preparedness Planning Sensitive to Social Vulnerabilities in Istanbul” supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. She is currently working on her master’s thesis under supervision of Dr. Sibel Karadağ, that focuses on the current political space for non-citizens in Istanbul and their interrelations with local organizations. Her research interests are in the fields of critical migration studies, political sociology, social movement theories and critical humanitarianism. She worked as a project assistant between March 2023- September 2023.

Pınar Akar was born in Gaziantep in 1986. In 2022, she enrolled in the Philosophy undergraduate program at Gaziantep University. She is interested in political philosophy and is currently working on an essay on Marxism. She at the same time is enrolled in an undergraduate program in the Department of Child Development at the Faculty of Open and Distance Education at Istanbul University. She has received a grant from TÜBİTAK BiÇABA scholarship program. She worked as a project assistant between April 2023 - October 2023.