Prof. Erdem Yörük

Erdem Yörük is the convener of the Colombo Hub of the Global Forum on Development and Democracy. He is the Director of the Center for Computational Social Sciences at Koç University. He is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University and an Associate Member in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University (2012). His work focuses on social welfare and social policy, social movements, political sociology, and computational social sciences. 

Dr. Devaka Gunawardena

Dr. Devaka Gunawardena is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Scientists’ Association in Sri Lanka. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He writes regularly for the DailyFT and Polity Magazine in Sri Lanka, in addition to publishing in regional fora such as The Wire and Economic and Political Weekly. His research interests include political economy, development economics, and social movements.

Dr. Francesca Chiravesio

In 2023 Francesca completed her PHD in Sociology at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow where she worked at the International Laboratory for Social Integration Research. Trained as a qualitative researcher and now slowly moving towards mixed-methods, she investigates authoritarian regime stability and political legitimation. Her work focuses on contemporary Russia.

Dr. Jani De Silva

After a BA (Hons) in Political Science, Jani went on to do an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. She subsequently completed her Phd in Anthropology at the London School of Economics & Political Science, London. She has published widely on issues of masculinity, the body and violence, with a special focus on how tropes of hegemonic masculinity are deployed by regimes-in-power to emasculate, devalue and repress a range of dissident social groups who are castigated as violent but cowardly. She is presently working on how cultures of impunity emerge in politically unstable, war-torn and post-conflict societies, eroding democratic guardrails and creating the conditions for creeping autocratization. Her latest publication (2023) Inhabiting an embattled body: the making of warrior masculinities in Sri Lanka (Routledge: London & New York) focusses on the battlefield as a space where lesser masculinities struggle – desperately – to act out hegemonic practices.

Dr. Ian Karusigarira

Ian Karusigarira, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo (SSA) is a lecturer of Conflict and Social Change at the Graduate School of Global Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He has vast experience in security service in the government of Uganda. He has previously served as a Lecturer at Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Japan. He acquired his Bachelor of Arts in Social Science at Makerere University, Kampala, a Master’s in International Studies and a Ph.D. (Humanities) with interest in Regional and Inter-regional Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Dr. Nazan Üstündağ

Nazan Üstündağ received her Ph.D. in 2005 from the sociology department at Indiana University Bloomington. Between 2005 and 2018 she worked as an Assistant Professor at Boğaziçi University, Department of Sociology. Between 2020 and 2023 she received a fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation Patrimonies program. Between 2018 and 2020 she was an Academy in Exile and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund fellow. Currently, she is affiliated with Alice Solomon Hochschule in Berlin and broadcasts in Jin TV on worldwide news on women. Üstündağ’s work concerns feminist political theory, political imaginaries, gendered subjectivities and state violence in Kurdistan. Her book with the title, Mother, Politician and Guerilla: Political Imagination in the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, was published in 2023, by Fordham Press. She writes in different public venues and is a founding member of Women for Peace and Academics for Peace.

Dr. Pooja Kalita

Pooja Kalita is a sociologist by training and her core research areas are Gender Studies, Sociology of food, Heritage Studies and Visual Methods. Currently she is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the South Asia hub of the Central European University (CEU) Democracy Institute’s Global Forum on Democracy and Development. She is based at Social Scientists’ Association (SSA), Colombo, Sri Lanka and is also a Visiting Fellow to Colombo Institute for Human Sciences.

Dr. Sarah F. Thompson

Sarah is a postdoctoral fellow at SSA. She has a Ph.D. in political science, and her research centres on traditional governance and women’s political participation across Pakistan and Mexico. She is interested in using causal inference and field experiments to study these topics. Following this fellowship, she will join Cornell University’s Department of Government as an assistant professor.