Dr Hasret Cetinkaya is a post-colonial feminist ethnographer working in the field of critical human rights. Her research interests are at the intersection of gender theory, international human rights and post/decolonial theory. She has recently been awarded the Marie Sklodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA), funded by the UK Research and Innovation, for a project on ‘Re-making Human Rights: Gender and Self-fashioning in the Political Imaginary of Rojava’. This project explores the vernacular articulation of human rights by feminist activists in North Eastern Syria, and critically examines their alternative transnational political imaginary of rights. At stake are new and innovative ways of thinking about community, human rights and gendered subjectivities as well as ethics and politics in the colonial present.

Hasret holds a PhD from the Irish Centre for Human Rights, NUI Galway where she was a recipient of the prestigious Hardiman Doctoral Research Scholarship. Hasret has LLM degrees in International Law and Human Rights from both the University of Essex and University of Copenhagen. Hasret’s doctoral research examined the ways in which human rights discourse has reasoned about the phenomenon of “honour” beyond “honour-based violence”. This project is grounded in multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in North Kurdistan, Turkey and Denmark among Kurdish women who live with and through “honour” (namûs) in their everyday. This research on practices of so-called “honour” offered a critical rethinking of modalities of freedom and power in local and contextual ways. Much of Hasret’s research seeks to grapple with questions of the self, ethics and power within cultures of human rights and the law. She is also currently part of a transnational research project on practices of veiling in a global context.

For a recent profile on Dr Cetinkaya's research, please see here.