Prof. Ayse Durakbasa
Ayse Durakbasa is born in Iskenderun at 1961. She finished her studies at the Sociology Department in Bosphorus University. Her master thesis was on The Formation of Kemalist Female Identity. In Essex Üniversity (England) she finished her doctorate dissertation on the ‘ Reappraisal of Halide Edib for a Critique of Turkish Modernization’. She is now working as a professor in the Sociology Department of Marmara University. She has two children. She is working on gender sociology, women`s studies, Turkish Modernity and nationalism.

Prof. Fatmagül Berktay
Istanbul University, Head of the Political Sciences Department and gives lectures in the Women`s Studies in Istanbul University also. In addition to hundreds of papers, she is the author of two books: ‘Woman Against the Monolitic Religions’ and ‘ Being a Woman/Live and Write’. Prof. F. Berktay has participated and represented Turkey in various international bodies.

Prof. Yildiz Ecevit
Middle East Technical University, head of the Sociology Department, gives lectures in Women`s Studies Dept. of Middle East Technical University. Author of the book ‘Analysis of the paid women labour on the basis of social gender’. She has also contributed to more than ten books by writing one or two chapters of them. She has written hundreds of papers dealing with the women issue.

Sevgi Uçan –Çubukcu
Ass. Prof. Dr. at Istanbul University, Faculty of Political Sciences, Department of International Relations. She received her MSc in International Relations on the subject of ‘Turkish Feminist Movement’ from the Bosphorus University in 1995. She is member of the General Board of Women’s Library and Information Center Foundation and member of the Collective of Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation. She completed her PhD in International Relations in 2002 with her dissertation on ‘The Social Democracy in Post-Industrial Society: New Labour Party and The Third Way’ in Istanbul University. She teaches ‘Feminist Theory, ‘Gender and Democracy’, ‘Globalisation and Politics’, ‘The Theory of Politics’ and ‘Introduction to Political Science’. Her interests include new social movements, feminism, gender issues, globalisation, democracy and social democracy.

Selection

Report on the selection process by the Turkish FRAGEN team

At the start of the FRAGEN project, the Women`s Library has formed a commission with young academics along with three members of the general board. We have gotten in touch with the feminist academics who are in the final selection committee and the commission of the library as the responsible authority.

The commission of the library is formed by AsliDavaz, Seyda Talu, Birsen Talay, Fatma Ture & Sevgi Cubukcu. Ayse Durakbasa didn’t prepare a separate form but attended the meetings. Fatmagul worked with Sevgi yet she attended the meetings also. Since prof. Ecevit was in Ankara and Sirin Tekeli was abroad they have sent their forms. In the meantime we have appealed to women studies departments of the universities, we have asked all their academics to fill in the forms and along with an information sheet explaining the aim of the project.

Secondly we have sent these forms to prominent feminist writers, researchers who are not working in the universities. We have appealed to the women organisations especially from diffferent groups such as the Islamic groups and Kurdish women. All those forms filled by them are sent to us. Unfortunately we have sent approximately to more than one hundred women yet we have only received 40 forms. They are evaluated by the commission and selective academics.

At the final meeting of the commission the final list was formed by the ones who were present in Istanbul. In our first session we have chosen periodicals which are quite influential yet since it is difficult to present all the issues and also as a result of the problem to assure the copyright we had to limit our selection with the first issue of the periodicals. The exception is ‘The Women`s Voice’ where the number of issues is less and the copyright is easy to achieve. On the other hand there are profound researches on violence and reports on the economic and social rights of women yet we are limited with ten choices and began from the sixties. Therefore a lot of text is excluded. The project stimulated us to creat an anthology. With a broader perspective, we’ll continue the work in the long run. We will inform you as soon as we are ready with the texts to be the part of the QUING project.

Research

The Turkish texts and surveys have been analysed by Piril Kazanci, political scientist and researcher.

Piril Kazanci is a political scientist and researcher. She studied political science and public administration in Bilkent University between 2001 and 2005. After a year of intensive postgraduate certificate programme in European Union Studies at Ankara University, she moved to The Netherlands for a master’s level study. She received her master’s degree also in the field of political science from Leiden University in 2008. Her master’s thesis discusses the reflection of sublime nationhood and gendered citizenship discourses in school textbooks in Turkey. From 2010 to 2011 she attended PhD level lectures in Utrecht University, Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies. Until 2012 she continued to work on her PhD project which aims at researching the Europeanization of LGBT movements in Turkey. Since 2012 she was engaged with the research on the Turkish core feminist texts in the European Union (EU) project FRAGEN at Atria, Institute on Gender Equality and Women`s History. Within the framework of the FRAGEN project, she analyzed ten Turkish core feminist texts mainly from the 1980s. Among her research interests are: gender inequalities in Turkey and the EU, feminist theories, Turkish LGBT movement, feminist movement in Turkey, Europeanization, feminist and queer institutionalism, gendered citizenship practices, interdisciplinary and queer theory.