Özlem Savas

Özlem Savaş earned a Dr.Phil in Cultural Studies from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2008). She worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University (2008-2018) and as a research fellow at the Berlin Institute of Integration and Migration Research (BIM) at Humboldt University (2018-2021). She also held visiting fellowships at The Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM) and the University of Konstanz as well as a teaching appointment at Berlin University of Arts. 

Özlem has carried out ethnographic research projects that intersect migration studies, media studies, and cultural studies with a particular focus on everyday practices. Her current research interests focus on migration and exile; affect, feeling, and emotion; and digital cultures. She has published on collective and political feelings of migration, affective digital media practices, diasporic aesthetics and material cultures of the everyday, and visual culture in political Islam. Her current ethnographic research addresses contemporary exilic atmospheres in Berlin with a special focus on affective culture of new migration from Turkey and explores collective, public, and political potentials of emotions and affects.

Selected academic publications:

• “Rakı Table Conversations of New Migration from Turkey: Emotion, Intimacy and Politics,” in Material Culture and Forced Migration: Materializing the Transient. Eds. F. Yi-Neumann , A. Lauser, A. Fuhse and P. J. Bräunlein. London: UCL Press, forthcoming in 2021. 
• “Affective Digital Media of New Migration from Turkey: Feelings, Affinities, and Politics,” International Journal of Communication 13, 2019, pp. 5405-26. 
• “Migrant Journeys of Loss, Uncertainty, and Hope,” Paragrana: International Journal of Historical Anthropology 28(2), 2019, pp. 95-100. 
• “Facebook Communities About Nostalgic Photos of Turkey: Creative Practices of Remembering and Representing the Past,” Digital Creativity 28(1), 2017, pp. 48-57. 
• “Taste Diaspora: The Aesthetic and Material Practice of Belonging,” Journal of Material Culture 19(2), 2014, pp. 185-208. 
• “The Muslim “Crying Boy” in Turkey: Aestheticization and Politicization of Suffering in Islamic Imagination,” in Rhetoric of the Image: Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East. Eds. C. Gruber and S. Haugbolle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 103-126.  
• “The Collective Turkish home in Vienna: Aesthetic Narratives of Migration and Belonging,” Home cultures 7(3), 2010, pp. 313-340. 

Contact:
Dr. Özlem Savaş
Cultural Studies
o.savas[at]berlin.bard.edu