Elif Gezgin
Associate Professor of Sociology, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University
Dr Elif Gezgin is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Türkiye and a Visiting Academic at the University of Oxford. Her research sits at the intersection of racism, gender-based discrimination, sexuality and nationalism, exploring how social boundaries are constructed through ideas of morality, identity and belonging.
Drawing on ethnographic research with Roma communities in Turkey, Gezgin examines how gender and race become markers of social difference and how normative understandings of family and morality contribute to racialised boundaries of belonging. Her work brings together research on Romaphobia, heteronormativity and nationalism to investigate the ways exclusionary boundaries are produced, contested and reproduced.
Her current research at Oxford, Tracing Heteronormativity within Romaphobia: Gender, Family and Social Boundary Making in the Turkish Case, explores how family and gender norms shape racialised understandings of belonging. Combining earlier fieldwork with new research on public discourse and civil society, the project examines the intersections of Romaphobia, nationalism and anti-gender politics.
Gezgin has held postdoctoral fellowships at Lund University in Sweden and Kadir Has University’s Gender and Women’s Studies Research Center in Türkiye. She has also contributed to international research projects on Roma communities, social exclusion and resistance to anti-gender movements, including the UKRI-funded Roma PlaceAge project at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland.