Dilan Bozgan

Dilan Bozgan

Research Topic: Transnational Circulations, Resignifications, and Political Legitimacy of Indigenous Women’s Leadership in the Global South: Ethnographic Perspectives on Gender, Modernity, and Ethnicity/Indigeneity.

Country: Türkiye

Columbia Global Center: Santiago

Dilan Bozgan is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Anthropology at the Escuela IDAES, Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina. She specializes in the comparative political anthropology of stateless and Indigenous feminist movements, integrating analyses of nation-state formation, memory, and symbolic politics with feminist and decolonial methodologies. Her dissertation, “Gender, Modernity and Ethnicity/Indigeneity: Circulations, Conflicts and Re-Symbolizations of Indigenous Women in the Global South,” examines how Kurdish and Indigenous women’s movements are represented, re-signified, and contested within transnational political networks, with particular attention to the role of memory, experiences of political violence, and the formation of feminist political subjectivities. Drawing on extensive multi-sited ethnography across Latin America and the Middle East, archival research, and critical discourse analysis, her work offers a situated alternative framework for understanding international politics, decolonial feminist epistemologies, and women’s agency beyond state-centered paradigms. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics with a minor in History from the Middle East Technical University (Turkey) and postgraduate specializations in gender and ethnicity from Ankara University (Turkey) and Utrecht University (Netherlands), grounding her research in an interdisciplinary foundation that bridges political economic, historical, and anthropological perspectives.

She has co-taught graduate seminars in Argentina on gender and power, and coordinated a social research institute in Turkey, leading projects on the Kurdish Question, focusing on language rights, forced displacement, disarmament, and women’s political participation, while developing policy proposals for peaceful conflict resolution. Her experience includes coordinating internationally supported research, facilitating dialogues with global peace processes, and authoring both peer-reviewed publications and articles for independent and feminist media. Recognized through international fellowships, she remains actively engaged in regional and transnational feminist networks.

Her project at the Columbia Global Center in Santiago examines the transnational circulations, re-significations, and political legitimacy of Indigenous women’s leadership in the Global South, with a focus on Kurdish and Indigenous women’s activism. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina, Chile, and Turkey, it explores how indigenous women leaders challenge colonial and orientalist visualities, re-symbolize bodies and territories, and negotiate gendered and ethnic/Indigenous claims to political legitimacy. By comparing experiences in Argentina and Chile, the project fosters South–South feminist dialogues, generating insights that inform both academic debates and advocacy strategies aimed at strengthening the collective voices of Indigenous and stateless women. 

She is fluent in Turkish, Spanish, and English, with working knowledge of Kurdish.

Selected Publications

  • “Zilan y la Guerra de Significantes: Interpretaciones sobre la inmolación de una militante kurda.” Etnografías Contemporáneas, Año 6, No. 10 (2020), pp. 224–259.
  • “El Movimiento de Mujeres Kurdas en Turquía desde 1990.” In Feminismos y Poscolonialidad 2, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Godot, 2016, pp. 153–177.
  • “Kürdistan’dan Abya Yala’ya Kadın Mücadelelerinin Hissi-Düşünüm Güzargâhları.” In Kürtler ve Cumhuriyet, Ankara: Dipnot, 2023, pp. 701–708.
  • “The Kurdish Issue in Turkey: The Right to Exist is not Enough” (co-authored with Nurcan Baysal and Nina Henkens). Südosteuropa Mitteilungen, 51 (2011), pp. 12–25.

“Kürt Kadın Hareketi Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme.” In Prof. Dr. Nermin Abadan Unat'a Armağan: Birkaç Arpa Boyu... 21. Yüzyıla Girerken Türkiye'de Feminist Eleştirinin Birikimi, Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2011, pp. 757–799.