Gökçe Yurdakul

Gökçe Yurdakul (born in 1974) is Georg Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social Conflict at the Institute of Social Sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin in Berlin, Germany. Her work focuses on issues relating to immigration, citizenship, anti-racism, and gender. She has published several books and articles, most notably about the Turkish immigrant community in Germany and debates about citizenship, social inclusion, gender and minority rights.

Career

Born in Istanbul, Yurdakul received her BA degree in sociology from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She completed her MA degree in Gender and Women’s Studies with a thesis on the female body and its representations in medicine at the Gender and Women’s Studies Graduate Program at Middle East Technical University in 1998. In 2006, she received her PhD in sociology from the University of Toronto for her dissertation „Mobilizing Kreuzberg: Political Representation, Immigrant Incorporation and Turkish Associations in Berlin,” which explores how immigrant associations politically participate in Germany’s integration debates.

After teaching at Brock University in Canada and at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, Yurdakul came to Berlin as a post-doctoral fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. In 2009, she was appointed as Georg Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social Conflict at the Institute of Social Sciences and the Berlin Graduate School for Social Sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin. Yurdakul regularly offers courses for graduate students on citizenship, immigration, qualitative methods, critical race theory, and gender and family sociology, among others. She also collaborates with the Transdisciplinary Gender Studies Program and the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt University Berlin. Yurdakul is one of the founding members of Berlin Institute for Migration and Integration Research and the co-chair of the Foundations of Migration and Integration Research (2014).

Yurdakul became known for her work on the relations between Jews and Turks in Germany, which she completed as a part of her post-doctoral research at the Free University of Berlin (2009). In her work, she analyses how political leaders of Turkish immigrant communities take Jewish trope as a model to build themselves as a minority in Germany. Parts of this work have been published as articles in edited books and academic journals in German and English (2006, 2010, 2011).

Yurdakul’s most recent work is on political and media debates on honor [...] and forced marriage in Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and Canada. This work is commissioned to Yurdakul and her colleague Anna Korteweg (University of Toronto) by the United Nations Research Institute For Social Development for the project on Religion, Politics and Gender Equality and published as a part of their thematic paper series. Yurdakul is currently working on religious Muslim women’s issues in Western Europe and Turkey, including civil rights violations through headscarf bans.

Yurdakul has published articles and books together with Y. Michal Bodemann and with Anna C. Korteweg, both professors of sociology at the University of Toronto. Currently, Yurdakul lives in Berlin and speaks fluent Turkish, English, and German.

Bibliography

Books

• The Headscarf Debates. Conflicts of National Belonging, Stanford University Press, 2014 (with Anna C. Korteweg)

• Staatsbürgerschaft, Migration und Minderheiten: Inklusion und Ausgrenzungsstrategien im Vergleich (Citizenship, Migration and Minorities: Comparative Inclusion and Exclusion Strategies), Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010 (with Michal Bodemann)

• From Guest workers into Muslims: Turkish Immigrant Associations in Germany, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009 extract

Edited books

• Citizenship and Immigrant Incorporation: Comparative Perspectives on North America and Western Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 (with Michal Bodemann)

• Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 (with Michal Bodemann)

Book chapters

• „Juden und Türken in Deutschland“ (Jews and Turks in Germany) in: Staatsbürgerschaft, Migration und Minderheiten: Inklusion und Ausgrenzungsstrategien im Vergleich (Citizenship, Migration and Minorities: Comparative Inclusion and Exclusion Strategies), Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010 (with Michal Bodemann)

Journal articles

• Islamic Activism and Immigrant Integration: Turkish Organizations in Germany, Immigrants and Minorities, 29 (1): 64-85, 2011 (with Ahmet Yükleyen)

• Gender Islam and Immigrant Integration: Boundary Drawing on Honour [...] in the Netherlands and Germany, Ethnic and Racial Studies 32(2): 218-238, 2009 (with Anna C. Korteweg)

• Citizenship and Immigration: Assimilation, Multiculturalism and the Challenges to the Nation State, Annual Review of Sociology 34: 153-179, 2008 (with Irene Bloemraad and Anna C. Korteweg)

• “’We Don't Want to be the Jews of Tomorrow’: Jews and Turks in Germany after 9/11,” German Politics and Society 24 (2): 44-67, 2006 (first author with Michal Bodemann) Reprinted in: Michael Laskier (ed.): Judaism and Islam in Medieval & Modern Times, Gainesville: University Press of Florida (2011)

• Culture of Honour, Culture of Change: A Feminist Analysis of Honour Killings in Rural Turkey, Journal of Violence Against Women, 7 (9): 964-998, 2001 (with Aysan Sev’er)

Other publications

• Religion, Culture and the Politicization of Honor-Related Violence: A Critical Analysis of Media and Policy Debate in Western Europe and North America, Thematic Paper commissioned by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development for the project on Religion, Politics and Gender Equality, 2010 (with Anna C. Korteweg)

See also

• Anna Korteweg official homepage

• Y. Michal Bodemann, University of Toronto faculty profile

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