Devran Koray Öcal
I am a political geographer originally from Turkey. I am broadly interested in geopolitics and the geographies of states.
My current research project focuses on the everyday militarism in Kurdish villages on Turkey's Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian borders through the concepts of domestic geopolitics, intimate militarism, and fragmented legal geographies. This research aims to understand how fragmentations and ruptures in legal systems, particularly impunity, enable the construction of domestic geopolitical formations –both within domestic territories of states and in the intimate lives of local communities. I currently collect qualitative data through interviews and archival research for this research.
In my doctoral dissertation, I analyzed the Turkish-Muslim diaspora's everyday transnational spaces through a feminist ethnographic focus on Turkish mosques across Germany. This research conceptualized mosques in Europe as intimate community spaces within a complex combination of local, transnational, and transregional territorial politics. This research showed that the feelings of home, caring, and unity that Muslim communities find in mosques transform these sacred spaces into homeland territories. Through this correlation between intimacy and national borders and representations, my research argued that state spaces overflow from government buildings and military bases to find a further embodiment in religious spaces through emotions and feelings.
I completed my BA (2010) and MA degrees (2013) in Turkey in the field of Political Science. I obtained my Ph.D. in Geography (2020) at the University of North Carolina (UNC-CH) at Chapel Hill. I instructed courses at UNC-CH and Duke University during my doctoral studies. After working one semester at TED University in Ankara as an Assistant Professor in Sociology, I joined the Institute of Geography at Bern University as a Postdoctoral Researcher in February 2022. Since then, I have been working here with a group of outstanding feminist scholars at the division of Social and Cultural Geography (GIUB) under the leadership of Dr. Carolin Schurr. At GIUB, I instruct Political Geography and Feminist Geopolitics MA seminars. At the same time, I supervise BA and MA theses.
For more information about my studies, as well as for accessing my articles and course syllabuses, please contact me!
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
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