15 Jun 2026

WEBINAR Women and Leadership: Allyship, Power, and Graceful Assertion

online

Series: EASA Women in Leadership Development Series

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Date: Monday, 15 June 2026, 4 PM CEST/ 3 PM BST

Duration: 90 minutes

The EASA Mentorship Programme together with Drs Sertaç Sehlikoglu (Univeristy College London) and Roberta Raffaetà (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) is pleased to present the third and final webinar in the series “EASA Women in Leadership Development Series: Building Inclusive Academic Allyships.” The session, titled “Women and Leadership: Allyship, Power, and Graceful Assertion,” will be moderated by Dr Sultan Doughan (Goldsmiths, University of London). We are delighted to welcome Drs. Ana Ivasiuc (PrecAnthro/University College Dublin), Cristina Grasseni (Leiden University), and Giulia Zanini (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) as guest speakers.

This is the third and concluding session of a three-part series which addresses the critical gap in leadership development for women anthropologists, with particular attention to intersectional challenges and inclusive leadership practices. Drawing on the discussions from our previous sessions on navigating precarity and building solidarity, this final webinar turns to the question of allyship: what it looks like in practice, how power can be asserted authentically across difference, and how inclusive leadership can create lasting structural change. The webinar-workshops accompany the one-to-one mentoring process sponsored by the EASA Mentorship Programme but remain open to all, programme members and non-members alike.

The webinar is open to all, but registration is required. Click here to register and get the zoom link:

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Speakers

Dr

Ana Ivasiuc

University College Dublin

Ana Ivasiuc is a social anthropologist and teaching fellow at University College Dublin. Her current work focuses on far-right vigilantism in Europe and explores its enabling factors and consequences in urban and borderland spaces. Previously, she conducted ethnographic research on the formal and informal policing of Roma migrants in Italy within the Collaborative Research Centre “Dynamics of Security: Forms of Securitisation in Historical Perspective” at the University of Giessen, Germany, and received funding from the Gerda Henkel Foundation for her research on vigilantism. She also published on Roma activism and development interventions aimed at Roma social inclusion. Ana served as president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists between 2023 and 2025, and is currently serving as vice-president while still being precarious.

Prof.

Cristina Grasseni

Leiden University

Cristina Grasseni is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. She specialises in economic and multimodal anthropology, researching issues of sustainability and citizenship, food heritage and responsible innovation. As PI of the ERC Consolidator grant FoodCitizens (2017–2024), she led a team of eight researchers comparing collective food procurement across Europe. She is co-editor of the Encyclopaedia of Economic Anthropology (2025, Edward Elgar) and is known for her “Skilled Visions” approach to visual ethnography. In 2011, she was appointed David and Roberta Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Dr

Giulia Zannini

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Giulia Zanini is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Since completing her PhD at the European University Institute, she has held positions across Europe including at the University of the Aegean, the University of Barcelona, Queen Mary University of London, and the University of Padua. She works in the field of reproduction, health and gender, and is currently PI of the ERC Starting Grant-funded project PregDaT, leading an interdisciplinary team on the socio-technical construction of reproductive and pregnancy time.

Chair

Sultan Doughan

Dr

Sultan Doughan

Goldsmiths, University of London

Dr Sultan Doughan is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Goldsmiths, University of London in the department of Anthropology. She is also the convenor of the MA programme Anthropology & Museum Practice and the interim co-director of the newly founded Migrant Futures Institute at Goldsmiths. Her monograph project Converting Citizens: German Secularism, Holocaust Education and Race is based on her dissertation research in Berlin, Germany and deals with the minority question in Germany after the Holocaust. She is also working on a co-edited volume titled Europe’s Question of Palestine: The Politics of Erasure and Refusal in Germany and Beyond. Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Berlin Program for Advanced European and German Studies, the Richard Diebold Fund for Linguistic Anthropology as well as by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Fellowship through the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to coming to the department of anthropology at Goldsmiths, she was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University (2019-2021) and a visiting assistant professor the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University (2021-2022). Doughan holds a Phd from Anthropology, UC Berkeley (2018) and an MA from FU Berlin (2009), where she graduated from Arabic, Islamic Studies and Political Science. Her writings have been published in Cultural Anthropology Fieldnotes, Transit Journal for the Study of Migration, and The Annual Review of Sociology of Religion, as well as in Errant Journal and Arts of the Working Class.

Organisers

Sertaç Sehlikoglu

University College London

Sertaç Sehlikoglu, PhD, SFHEA, is a social anthropologist specialised in subjectivity, gender, and sexuality in the Middle East. Her work often focuses on the intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life, such as intimacy, agency, desire, and imaginaries. Before joining UCL in 2020, Sehlikoglu worked as an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge (2014-2020) and completed two research fellowships at the University of Cambridge: Abdullah Mubarak al-Sabah Fellowship in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Pembroke College (2016-2020) and a Gibbs Travelling Fellowship at Newnham College (2018-2019).

Sehlikoglu is the recipient of several awards and grants, including a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2019), an Innovative Talent Foreign Expert Project Fellowship Award (2021-2022), a Wadad Kadi Fellowship (2013) for her work on Islamic masculinities, a BIAA (British Institute at Ankara) Study Grant (2012), and a BRISMES (British Institute of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, 2012) Award. Her ERC project, “Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics Across the Balkan-to-Bengal Complex” (TAKHAYYUL, 853230, StG 2019), is composed of six work packages and spans across the Balkans (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia), the Middle East (Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Palestine), and South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan).

Her first single-authored monograph, Working Our Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul (Syracuse UP, 2021), combines detailed ethnographic research with an intricate analysis of gendered desires and subjectivities in contemporary Turkey. Its implications extend beyond the immediate context, offering insights for studying gender, agency, and the impact of neoliberal consumer society in the modern Middle East. As an accomplished editor, she edited and co-edited several special issues on themes related to intimacy, critique, and ethical imagination.

Roberta Raffaetà

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

I am associate professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Deputy Director of NICHE (The New Institute: The Centre for Environmental Humanities), where I coordinate the research cluster ‘Technoscience, Health and Justice in an Interdependent Planet’. Since obtaining a PhD at the University of Lausanne (Laboratoire d’anthropologie culturelle et sociale, Faculté des Sciences Sociales et Politiques), I have worked at various universities in Italy (Milano-Bicocca, Bologna, Verona, Trento, Bolzano) and abroad (UCLA, UCSD, Monash Melbourne, Lausanne). My research has been funded by the European Commission (Marie Curie and ERC), Fulbright (Schuman), The Italian Ministry of Research (FARE, PRIN, PNRA), Wenner Gren and Parco Adamello Brenta.

While in dialogue with other disciplines, my research practice is rooted in anthropology because it nourishes my desire for transformative political spaces. Anthropology offers both the conceptual imagination and the methodological tools to not only envision these spaces but to help bring them into being—by recognizing and elevating otherwise ways of knowing and practicing in the world. In my work, I am interested in ethnographically exploring and anthropologically theorizing the diverse ways in which people give meaning and assign value to ‘life’ and how this can provide insights on how to live well together as humans in an interdependent and more-than-human planet. To empirically approach these questions, I focus on the concept of ‘health’ as it connects human and environmental dimensions. Acknowledging the global and accelerating influence of technoscience on the governance of human and more-than-human existences, I study the interfaces between technoscience, health and social justice, in the constant effort to make these concepts more suited to the challenges we are facing in particular places and as humans. I explore how technoscience creates both new possibilities and troubling power dynamics in a planet where the interdependence of humans and non-humans is increasingly evident through biosocial crises. The regional focus of my research is Italy (Trentino Alps), California and Hawaii. My research takes me from libraries and labs to the ocean and mountains, tracing connections that span from microbes and bears to global computational models.

Contacts

Sultan Doughan