Ayten Alkan (Assoc. Prof., PhD.) is a visiting scholar at our Centre thank to the two-months research scholarship of French Embassy in Ankara. She worked for eight years at the University of Istanbul, Faculty of Political Science. She taught at the Political Science and Public Administration Department (Urban and Environmental Studies Branch) of the Faculty, as well as at Women’s Studies Department of Social Sciences Institute. Before University of Istanbul, she worked at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Ankara for thirteen years (1995-2008) and lectured at the same departments there. Besides, she was active together with the group of Women’s Studies Centre of the University. She delivered, at undergraduate and graduate levels, courses such as Local Governments, Space - Politics and Gender, Social Sciences and Gender, Metropolis : Perspectives of Political Economy and Culture, Urban Theories, Regional and Local Development Policies.

Alkan is one of the Turkish academics who had to resign from their positions because of the political pressure of university administrations due to the case of “Academics for Peace of Turkey”. She is now taking the advantage of being able to rehandle her research titled “Revisiting the Right to the City from the Perspective of the Non-Human : The Case of Stray Animals”, while contributing to the scholarly environment of our Centre. Her research is a candidate to intertwine various disciplines from history to urban and environmental studies, and from critical animal studies to debates on the “anthropecene”.

Her recent publications are ; “New Metropolitan Regime of Turkey : Authoritarian Urbanization via (Local) Governmental Restructuring” (Lex Localis - Journal Of Local Self-Government, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2015), “The Repercussions of Gezi in the Context of Relations between (Urban) Space, Citizens, and Local/Central Governments” (-together with C. Salman- Another Brick in the Barricade : The Gezi Resistance and Its Aftermath, ed. H. Aksu & G. Koç, Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung, Bremen, 2015) and “Deportation as an Urban Stray Dogs Management Policy : Forest Dogs of Istanbul” (Lex Localis - Journal of Local Self-Government, Vol. 14, N. 3., 2016.)