Gokce Yurdakul

Gokce Yurdakul (born 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. 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 has published on political and media debates on honor killing 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. Her most recent book with Anna Korteweg, The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts on National Belonging is an account of religious Muslim women’s issues in Western Europe and Turkey, including civil rights violations through headscarf bans. This book is forthcoming in German in 2016.