Photo credits:
Danish Saroee

İnan Özdemir Taştan

Barbro Klein Fellow, SCAS.
Independent Scholar, Ankara


İnan Özdemir Taştan is a Peace Academic from Turkey who was dismissed from her post at
Ankara University in 2017 for signing a petition entitled “We will not be a party of this crime!”
She received her PhD in 2013 from Ankara University Institute of Social Sciences, writing her
thesis on the rhetoric of radical left movements in Turkey in the 1970s. After completing her PhD,
she offered courses on public relations, political communication and research methods.

She has taken part in several research projects focusing on political campaigns and media. Her
recent publications have focused especially on the electoral speeches of political leaders and
their perception of democracy; the increasing religionization of politics in Turkey; political
debates on Syrian immigration; radical media and resistance under AKP governments. She has
published several papers and book chapters in the area of media studies. Moreover, she is the
co-author of the books Seçimlik Demokrasi (2018) (Voting Democracy) and Vaatten Duaya,
Anayasadan Kur’an’a: Siyasette Dinselleşme
(2019) (From Promise to Prayer, Constitution to
Koran: Religionization of Politics). Her most recent work is “A Report on Academic Freedoms in
Turkey in the Period of the State of Emergency” (with Aydın Ördek, 2020), which is based on
the results of a large-scale survey with academicians and students in Turkey. She sits on the
editorial board of Kültür ve İletişim/culture&communication and was its editor during the period
2018-2020.

At SCAS, Özdemir Taştan will be working on the state of the media in the post-truth era and
under conditions of rising authoritarianism. More specifically, focusing on Turkey as a case,
she will analyze the discursive strategies of “slanted” media in the justification and legitimation of
government policies.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2020-21.