This lecture is offered as part of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Language Institute (APTLI) and is open to to students and the public.
The focus of this lecture will be on LGBTI+ rights advocacy and/or service provision for women and LGBTI+ populations pre-Covid-19 & during the pandemic in different contexts in Turkey, and the implications on related issues, including: shrinking space in civil society, the precarity of human rights for the LGBTI+ community in Turkey, the line between solidarity and contestations. Overall, you will be hearing the story of a trans activist resisting in Turkey despite all these happening.
Emirhan Deniz Çelebi
Having graduated from the Department of English Language Teaching in 2012, Emirhan Deniz Celebi worked as an English Teacher at a private school in 2012 and 2014. In 2014, he started to work as an Education Coordinator in SPoD. He organized a number of pieces of training based on gender equality for different groups of professions such as psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers and lawyers. He worked as a trainer at some of these pieces of training on LGBTI + Basic Concepts, Legal Gender Recognition Process in Turkey and Europe, Being LGBTI+ in Business and LGBTI+ Inclusive Company Policies. He worked as a coordinator in the training project called “LGBTI+ Inclusive Education” funded by the Swedish Consulate in collaboration with Bilgi University SECBIR. He also went on rights-based advocacy on the UN axis and visited the UN Headquarters in NYC with the scholarship of Outright Action International in 2016. Çelebi completed his MA degree in the Sociology Department of Yıldız Technical University in 2018 with his thesis called “Sociological Analysis of Factors Affecting the Legal Gender Recognition Process of Trans Men in Turkey”. He participated in national and international workshops and conferences as a speaker. Also, he is a PhD candidate in Educational Sciences at Bogazici University. He has been working as the Education Coordinator of Sabanci University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence since September 2018.
