Ezer, Özlem, Post Doc

By bjorn on 17 Jun | 0 comments

Short Biography
An avid advocate of interdisciplinary studies, Ozlem Ezer has taught Sociology, English Literature, and English as a Second Language as a teaching assistant and lecturer in various universities in North America and Turkey. With a B.A. in English Language and Literature (Bogazici University, Istanbul), an M.A. (IFU / International Women’s University, Germany, and ODTU, Ankara), and just about to finish her Ph.D. in Women's Studies (York University, Toronto), her area of expertise is on women's life writing with a focus on travel literature and stereotypes / representations of different nations since the 17th century. Aside from her academic work, she worked with diverse groups and organizations, including the United Nations Development Program (Ankara), volunteered at women's shelters in Chicago, wrote women's stories and conducted interviews for progressive feminist journals (in Turkish and English). She spent one term at the University of San Diego on a writing grant in 2005. She is interested in the cross-sections of academic and creative writing, and how the intellectuals’ work and the university structures can better address the needs of everyday life and become transformative for individuals. As a feminist, she strongly believes that the personal is political and defines success as a balance between one’s personal life and intellectual production.

Some selected publications available online:

http://www.sandiego.edu/peacestudies/documents/ipj/Thavory-Huot-Cambodia.pdf
http://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/3132/1/Feminismos_4_04.pdf
http://www.bridgew.edu/Soas/jiws/Jun04/BookReview.pdf

GEXcel Project: SHIFTING THE POWER WITHIN UNIVERSITIES
My research will reflect on some of the key questions on knowledge production from a feminist perspective and shift the focus regarding epistemology from “what” to “whose knowledge” question.  While pursing answers for this, I aim to analyze selected intellectuals who produced knowledge in and outside of academia, some of whom are figures from feminist movements such as Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millet. I acknowledge that the transition between two groups is mostly inevitable. Yet, I have been fascinated by the irony that a significant amount of knowledge produced outside of academia can be celebrated and taught as “Canon” at the universities. Sometimes these intellectuals were critical of the dynamics and hierarchies of institutions such as universities. Among the examples are Antonio Gramsci and Virginia Woolf.

As locations of knowledge production and distribution around the world, universities can serve as loci of liberation and imprisonment simultaneously, especially for scholars of feminist and gender studies. As a feminist academic, I intentionally aim to challenge the conventions of academic writing even at the expense of one’s credibility as an academic. Thus, the language and its boundaries will also be included in my research on shifting the power over and within the universities. As an extension of the language component of my research at Linköping University, I also want to question the invisibility of non-Western texts in academia and draw attention to the importance of professional and continuous efforts of translation. In this context, I am willing to cooperate with scholars across cultures who also conduct studies on the similar themes and channel information into an English-medium academic arena.

Production of knowledge, its fluctuating locations for intellectuals and feminist scholars, and their links to power positions are the key points of my research. Although gender awareness in academic power relations has been an important issue for me, I would like to integrate works by male intellectuals (Antonio Gramsci in particular) and their critiques in the feminist circles into my research. I am open to expand the boundaries of this project in the future and can analyze different intellectuals’ work in cooperation with the fellow scholars across cultures.