Hande Paker

Hande Paker is a political sociologist based at the Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences at Bahcesehir University.

She has carried out research and written in various outlets (e.g., Environmental Politics, Theory and Society, Radikal2, Perspectives) on modes of civil society-state relations, politics of the environment at the local-global nexus, and grounded cosmopolitan citizenship, with a particular focus on environmental struggles and women’s rights. She has worked on the relations and effectiveness of environmental organizations in Turkey supported by a TUBITAK grant. Another strand of research has focused on gender inequality in relation to which she was recently a research associate in the TUBİTAK project on “The analysis of labor force participation decisions of high school and university graduate women in Turkey.”

As a Mercator-IPC Fellow, she aims to analyze how environmental civil society actors engage the issue of climate change to mobilize publics by focusing on local and transnational environmental spaces of action.

Paker holds a PhD from McGill University, Canada. She received her MA from McGill University as well and her BA from Boğaziçi University.