“Friends or Foes: Women Navigating Leadership in Academia” — EASA Women in Leadership Development Series, part 2

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.

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.