Cavidan Soykan
Cavidan Soykan gained her BA and MA degrees in political science from Ankara University. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Essex in the UK and wrote her thesis on the Turkish asylum system from sociology of law perspective. For this study, she conducted a multi-sited legal ethnography on Afghan, Iraqi, Iranian, Somali and Sudanese refugee populations living in transit in Turkey. Upon her return from the UK, she taught human rights at the undergraduate level and research methods and ethics for the Human Rights MA programme at Ankara University from 2014 to 2017. She worked at the currently closed-down Human Rights Centre of the Faculty of Political Science of the same university from 2005 to 2017.
Cavidan has been a member of the Association for Solidarity with Refugees (Multeci-Der) since 2009. She served on the board of the NGO as the vice-president for two terms between 2014 and 2018. Since 2017 she has been working as an independent consultant in the field of human rights. She contributed to different projects of women’s, LGBTs’ and human rights NGOs funded by the UNHCR, UN Women, UNICEF, EU and the Danish Refugee Council. She recently completed a gender monitoring report on women refugees in Turkey with a colleague from Sabancı University. Her main research interests are feminist politics of forced migration, sociology of rights and sociology of law.