The Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies (CMDS) at SOAS is a global hub for transdisciplinary research and teaching on issues related to migration and diaspora, and their intersection with racial, gendered, and class inequalities and struggles for justice.
Drawing on SOAS’s unique expertise in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East while extending to Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, the Centre fosters critical conversations about migration and diaspora in a truly global context.
Our work brings together scholars, students, and practitioners from across disciplines.
Our Mission
The Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies (CMDS) at SOAS University of London advances research and teaching on borders, migrations, diaspora and development. CMDS brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and draws on SOAS’long tradition of regional and transnational research from a decolonizing perspective.
Through rigorous scholarship and engaged collaboration, CMDS generates critical knowledge on migration and diaspora studies, creating a safe space for the development of political interventions that shape public, academic and policy discussions on migration.
Teaching
The teaching of migration at SOAS cuts across departments, disciplines, and perspectives. If you study in any of our UG and PG programmes, you will be able to find several migration-related open access modules.
Our two flagship programmes are for Graduate students. Click the links for more information.
Our Projects
Archives of Solidarity
Return – A conversation
Accommodating Asylum Seekers
Impact Acceleration Account
A £1.25 million ESRC-funded initiative transforming research on migration, displacement and marginalisation into real-world change. Through grants, fellowships, roundtables and community engagement, the IAA bridges academia and practice to challenge inequalities and influence policy.
Who we are
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Principal Investigator(s)
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Özlem is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology working at the intersection of political and legal anthropology.
She focuses on themes of state, citizenship, political violence, forced displacement and return, memory, heritage and property, diasporic communities, ethnic and religious minority citizens and refugees, and reconciliation processes and solidarity practices in conflict and post-conflict settings. For over two decades, Özlem has engaged ethnographically with the political, social and psychic effects of the protracted conflict in the border provinces of Southeastern Turkey through the perspective of Kurds, Arabs, and Syriacs/ Assyrians as well as diasporic communities residing in Sweden and Germany.
Her research focuses on different political subjectivities and strives to reveal tangible and intangible sites of violence where the political and ethical are constructed. She has brought these themes in her first book States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Co-existence in Southeast Turkey (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). The book was nominated for the 2021 Victor Turner Prize.
Özlem’s scholarship on political violence and legal anthropology also involves collaboration and joint publication with scholars from the UK, Switzerland, Germany, and Turkey. She has recently co-edited the volume Reverberations: Violence across Time and Space with Yael Navaro, Alice Von Bieberstein and Seda Altug (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), which brings together ethnographic accounts and critical insight on violence, materialism, and post-humanism, offering a new methodological framework to study political violence.
Ozlem is also a co-editor of the volume Law Against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law’s Transformations with Julia Eckert, Brian Donahoe and Christian Strumpell (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which explores the conditions and consequences of the use of law by ordinary individuals as a form of protest against the state. In recent years, Özlem has started on the waiting experiences of Syrian refugees in border towns of Turkey. With Özge Biner, she co-edited a special section on the Politics of Waiting: Ethnographies of Sovereignty, Temporality and Subjectivity in the Margins of the Turkish State in the Journal of Social Anthropology.
Özlem has recently received an AHRC award with a large project, Archives of Solidarity Archive of Solidarity: Precarity, Creativity and Shared Future-making Across Closed Borders. This collaborative and innovative anthropological project -aims to use oral history, ethnography, and literary and audio-visual methods to create a multi-modal digital archive of solidarity practices involving citizens and refugees in Turkey and the UK. The project involves multiple stakeholders from refugee-led organisations (including Kırkayak Kültür, Turkey and Kent Refugee Action Network, UK). In collaboration with Dr Özge Biner (College De France), Prof Leyla Neyzi (University of Glasgow), Prof Sabine Strasser (University of Bern), Kemal Vural Tarlan (Kırkayak Kültür), Dr Thomas Parkinson
(University of Kent) and Prof (David Herd, St Andrews and Refugee Tales Project), Özlem will start this multi-sited and multi-modal research project in September 2024.
Özlem is a member of the editorial advisory board of the BIAA-IB Tauris Contemporary Turkey series.
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Dr Paolo NovakDirector
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