SU Gender is organizing the 3rd International Gender Studies in Turkey Conference on December 6-7, 2025 in Istanbul. The conference will be held for the third time this year, and will take place for two days at Sabancı Center in 4. Levent, Istanbul. Opening speeches, roundtable session, parallel sessions, workshops and award sessions will be held. At this year’s conference, the keynote speech will be delivered on Saturday, December 6 at 10:45 a.m. by Banu Gökarıksel from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with moderation by Aslı İkizoğlu Erensü, Faculty Member at Sabancı University. You can find the abstract of the talk below.

Intimate Care at the Boundary: Feminist Geographies of Refugee Resettlement and Humanitarian Contradiction’

“This talk explores the paradox of intimate care in U.S. refugee resettlement: volunteers provide deeply personal support—entering homes, sharing meals, accompanying refugees—while navigating institutional demands for ‘healthy boundaries’ and rapid self-sufficiency. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, I show how care practices are shaped by neoliberal austerity and colonial humanitarian imaginaries that position refugees as grateful subjects and volunteers as saviors. By connecting feminist geographies of care with critiques of humanitarianism, I examine how volunteers negotiate these tensions through emotional labor, boundary-making, and acts of resistance, revealing both the reproduction of dominant logics and the potential for radical care.”

The conference aims to address the leading issues of gender studies on an interdisciplinary and intersectional basis and to make visible the contribution of feminist and queer perspectives, theories and methodologies and policy production in today's world where social inequalities are increasing.

For detailed information you can visit the conference web site.

*Please visit the web site to see the conference program.
* There is no registration fee for participation. Please fill out the online form for the conference registration.
* Simultaneous translation will be provided in the first day of the Conference (December 6, Saturday) in Turkish and English.
* For further questions please email to genderconf@sabanciuniv.edu

 

Short Biography

Banu Gökarıksel is a Professor of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She started to serve as the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies in 2021 and currently serving a second term. In the past, she served as The Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education at The Graduate School (2018-2021) and the co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2014-2018). Gökarıksel received her PhD in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle and MA in Sociology/Anthropology from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. She was awarded the 2017 Chapman Family University Teaching Award at UNC and the 2018 American Association of Geographers Enhancing Diversity Award. Gökarıksel co-directed Duke in Istanbul summer program in 2012 and 2013 and Duke Middle East in Europe summer program (based in Berlin) in 2018 and 2019. She serves on the Editorial Board of the journals Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Gender, Place, and Culture; and Political Geography. Her research examines bodies, intimacy, and everyday spaces as key sites of politics and geopolitics. She is currently working on a project that examines the role of volunteering and community sponsorship in refugee resettlement in North Carolina. Gökarıksel is a part of the feminist geography collective FLOCK.

For further information about her current interests please visit Projects.