List of Speaker Biographies
Frank Albrecht is Head of Division - Philipp Schwartz Initiative and Academic Freedom at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Zeina Al Azmeh is a political sociologist at the University of Cambridge. She currently serves as the Centenary Research Fellow at Selwyn College, an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Sociology, and a research associate at the Centre for Governance and Human Rights. Her research centres on the cultural sociology of intellectuals in exile and the political sociology of knowledge production related to revolutions and social movements. Her expertise lies in the sociologies of knowledge production and dissemination, memorialisation, and migration, particularly within contexts of political unrest and forced displacement. Her most recent publications include “Trauma work as hindrance to political praxis during democratisation movements” in Theory and Society, “Authorial Power, Authoritarianism, and Exiled Intellectuals: Syria and Turkey” in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and “The Right to Meaning: A Syrian Case Study” in Cultural Sociology. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 2021, focusing on the involvement of exiled Syrian intellectuals in the Syrian Revolution (2011).
Meral Apak is a Research and Teaching Fellow (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) with the Sage SAGE! project at Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin. Her research interests are Critical Pedagogy, Women’s Labour in Education, Gender Studies, Social Policy and Educational Policy, Discrimination Inclusion and Exclusion in Education. She currently works on emotions and affect in the context of precarity in higher education. She has published a book on power relations and motherhood in theschool context titled Breastfeeding Privatization in Public Education.
Silvia Ben Mahrez is a consultant for the anti-discriminatory opening of the university and the promotion of educational biographies at Alice Salomon University. She heads the ASH Pre-Study Programme, which prepares prospective students with international educational biographies for regular studies at ASH Berlin. She is writing her PhD in the context of social work and refugee biographies.
Esra Erdem is professor for Social Economics and Management at Alice Salomon University. She currently serves as research professor on the Sage SAGE! Project “International and in Solidarity” (Fall 2021- Summer 2024). She is the Academic Director of the MA Social Work as a Human Rights Profession. Her research interests include Solidarity Economies, Critical Migration Studies, and Critical University Studies. Recent publications include "Free universities as academic commons" in The Handbook of Diverse Economies edited by J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski (2020).
Ali Yalçın Göymen is a research associate and a Fellow of the Einstein Foundation Academic Freedom Programme at the Center for Social Critique, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research focuses on the Marxist theory of alienation, the politics of the commons, and theories of revolution in the 21st century.
Hülya Kendir is a Fellow of the Philipp Schwartz Initiative at the University of Kassel. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and worked at various universities in Turkey. As a signatory to the Academics for Peace Petition she was dismissed from her university by decree in 2016. She worked on some human rights projects between 2016 and 2021. She is one of the founders of Kocaeli Solidarity Academy. Her recent fields of study are restructuring of the state, civil society organizations, and social movements.
Aysuda Kölemen coordinates the Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative at Bard College Berlin. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Georgia, Athens, USA. Her research interests include public opinion and discourses on redistribution, politics of new religiosities, and democratic backsliding. She is currently working on authoritarianization and civil resistance in Turkey.
Florian Kohstall is the head of the Global Responsibility Unit of Freie Universität Berlin. In 2016 he founded Academics in Solidarity, a transnational Peer-to-Peer Mentoring Program for Displaced Scholars. Since 2020 he is project lead of the Berlin Center for Global Engagement of BUA. His areas of expertise are inclusiveness, responsible internationalization and transnational knowledge production. Kohstall taught political science in Aix-en-Provence, Cairo and Lyon. He is a former research fellow of CEDEJ, and alumnus of AGYA. His latest publication is Academics in Exile: Networks, Knowledge Exchange and New Forms of Internationalization, co-edited with Vera Axyonova and Carola Richter, transcript 2022.
Börries Nehe coordinates the International Research Group on Authoritarianism & Counter-Strategies (IRGAC). He holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with a specialization in Sociology. His work focuses on authoritarianism, far-right ideologies and movements as well as violence, social movements and state space theory, mostly in Latin America. He has recently published Beyond Molotovs. A Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies (with kollektiv orangotango & IRGAC, 2024), Global Authoritarianism. Perspectives and Contestations from the South (with IRGAC, 2022), and Geographie der Gewalt. Macht und Gegenmacht in Lateinamerika (together with Timo Dorsch & Jana Flörchinger, 2022).
Britta Ohm is senior researcher and lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the Institute of Film, Theater, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Mainz. Her research in political media anthropology looks at technological transformations and mediatisation in the context of state formation, democracy and activism. Her geographical focus is Europe (Germany, Turkey) and India.
Eren Paydaş is a scholar of legal theory from Turkey. Previously, he worked at Marmara University, Faculty of Law in Istanbul until he was dismissed in 2016. After coming to Germany, he has actively worked in the foundation of Academics for Peace Germany e.V. He completed his doctoral studies at Friedrich Alexander Universität in 2021. Later, he worked as an editor for Die Tageszeitung and Heinrich Böll Stiftung, and as a Project Manager in Off-University for the project Critical Peace Studies in Turkey. Currently, he is working as a translator and an independent researcher. His research areas cover Sociology of Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, and Human Rights.
Iris Vernekohl is Senior Policy Advisor for Global Engagement at Ruhr University Bochum where she directs the Scholars at Risk Program. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Scholars at Risk Network-Germany Section and chair of the Utrecht Network Task Force “Responsible Internationalization and Global Engagement: Promoting Academic Freedom and Academic Responsibility in International Higher Education”.
Betül Yarar is Professor of Sociology of Cultural Communication at Hacı Bayram Veli University Ankara (Turkey). She is also affiliated with the Helmut-Schmidt University Hamburg, where she worked as a Principal Researcher on the project "The inclusion of refugee-exile scientists/scholars into academic labour markets - support networks and biographical experiences in a three-country comparison" (2021-2022). Previously, she worked as a principal researcher with Prof. Dr. Yasemin Karakarşoğlu at the University of Bremen on the project "In-formal Opportunities and Restrictions in German Universities Reflected in the Experiences of Exiled Scholars", funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Her main research areas and academic interests are cultural studies and popular culture, gender and body politics, Turkey studies and qualitative research methods. Due to her personal experiences, she has recently developed an interest in social crises, humanitarianism and exile studies.
Zafer Yılmaz is a Research Fellow (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) with the Sage SAGE! project at Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin. He currently works on the rise of authoritarianism, the crisis of democracy and far-right populism and teaches the courses “Transformation of European party politics” at Humboldt Universität and “The New Politics of Welfare and the Rise of the Right-Wing Populism” at Alice Salomon Hochschule. His articles on populism, authoritarianism, and the AKP’s political ideology, new political regime in Turkey have been published in various academic journals and books. His last books are The Spirit of New Turkey: Resentment, Domination and Destitution as well asErdoğan’s Presidential Regime: From Exceptional Republic to Parcelled State.
