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I am an Assistant Professor of Management at Newcastle University Business School and an anthropologist exploring refugee lifeworlds. My research asks how individuals experience war, trauma, forced migration, and displacement, and how they rebuild their lives in unfamiliar environments. Agency, subject formation, embodiment, precarity, and temporalities are core areas of my inquiry.
I hold a Ph.D. in Management from the University of Bath, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Marmara University. Before entering academia, I worked as an NGO professional in Turkey and Afghanistan.
I serve on the editorial board of Human Relations.
Through ethnographic research with Syrian refugee women in Turkey, I explore how they survive in precarious conditions following war, trauma, and displacement, and how they rebuild their sense of self by exercising innovative forms of agentic practice. I focus on their feelings, senses, voices, silences, values, and ways of reasoning to understand how they re-establish their selves in highly precarious post-war circumstances.
I argue that foregrounding the experiences of refugee women is crucial not only for understanding how war and forced migration reshape millions of lives, but also for revealing how people strive to live with honour and dignity even in seemingly impossible circumstances. The virtue of honour that I found in my research is not exterior to these women but embedded in their very cells. I contribute to academia and policy by highlighting forms of life that are often overlooked, yet are equally important and meaningful as those lived elsewhere.
Inspirational books
Research
Duman-Cogen, E. N. (2026). Agency of silence: Female Syrian refugee workers and the reconstitution of the post-war self. Human Relations, 79(5), 533-564.
Teaching
Over the past four years, Elif has taught across undergraduate, Master’s, and PhD programmes at the Universities of Bath, Bristol, and Newcastle. Her teaching spans organisation and management, including:
Qualitative Methods for Management (PhD)
Managing and Leading Change (UG/MSc)
Strategic Management (MSc)
Critical Perspectives on Management and Organisation in Popular Culture (UG)
Managing Diversity (UG)
Understanding Work and Organisations (UG)
Research Methods (UG)
Management and Organisation (UG)
People and Organisations (UG)
Elif has also tutored and mentored first-year PhD researchers, supporting them in developing their methodological approaches and preparing ethics applications for fieldwork. She also supervises Master’s and undergraduate dissertations across a range of topics in management and organisation.
Awards and Honours
I received the Most Thought-Provoking PhD Student Paper Award at the Qualitative Research in Management (QRM) Conference in Albuquerque, USA, for my paper “Silence as an Ethical Agency: How Syrian Refugee Domestic Workers Reconstitute Themselves as Ethical Subjects” (2023).
Other Awards
Santander Postgraduate Mobility Award, University of Bath, 2024
University Research Studentship Award (URSA), PhD Studentship, University of Bath, 2020–2023
Full Scholarship, MA in Political Science, University of Toronto, 2015–2016
Honour Student Award, Faculty of Political Science, Marmara University (awarded to the Faculty’s highest-achieving students)
Conference
Bath Annual Feminist Philosophy Meeting 2025
Bath Annual Feminist Philosophy Meeting 2025
Theme: Poststructuralist Thinking and the work of Judith Butler
Bath Annual Feminist Philosophy Meeting 2026
Bath Annual Feminist Philosophy Meeting 2026
Theme: Postcolonial and Deconial Thinking and the work of Saba Mahmood
I co-organise the annual Bath Feminist Philosophy Conference, where each year we introduce and discuss one thinker's work. Next year, we turn to Hannah Arendt, whose thought is essential to understanding the current global political climate and to advancing refugee studies. Stay tuned!
Community-building: Refugee and Migration Research Network (RAMnet)
With my colleague Nosheen Khan, we founded the Refugee and Migration Research Network (RAMnet) at Newcastle University in March 2026. As the first initiative of its kind within Management and Organisation Studies (MOS), RAMnet seeks to establish refugee and migration studies as a recognised field within the discipline. By bringing scholars into conversation, we aim to build a community committed to producing empirically grounded, diverse, and critically informed knowledge about the lifeworlds of refugees and migrants—what it means to live, move, survive, and work under conditions of displacement.
Our work encompasses multiple forms of migration, with a particular commitment to advancing understanding and critical approaches to refugee and migrant experiences. RAMnet now includes 33 members across 16 universities in the UK and internationally.
Find out more about RAMnet: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/business/research/emerging-research-networks/ramnet/
Upcoming RAMnet Event
Upcoming RAMnet Event
Building a Refugee and Migration Research Community: Caring Epistemologies, Methodologies, Vocabularies, Imaginaries and Passions
(On behalf of the Refugee and Migration Research Network – RAMnet)
Convenors: Elif Nur Duman-Cogen and Nosheen Khan
Please join our workshop to meet scholars who are interested in and working on refugee and migration studies.
https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/icms-lancaster-2027/
For more information and to apply:
Some beauty, some inspiration
Some beauty, some inspiration
Fall’s Favourite
Fall’s Favourite
Stefania Pandolfo beautifully traces an ethnographic journey of madness and despair in Morocco. Through her philosophical and theological exploration, she introduces the soul, one of the less visible and less known elements of our existence, and its acts. The soul, however, shows itself at times in its torments, when it is choking or suffering. For Pandolfo, trauma is understood "at once as a historical event and as a window into the vicissitudes of the soul" (Pandolfo, 2018, p. 6). That is, what does my pain tell me about myself and my own existence in the world? The "window" into the soul becomes a powerful metaphor here, opening up ethical imaginaries and possibilities of embodied lives. Pandolfo brings to bear an Islamic philosophy that understands pain and suffering as a divine ordeal (ibtilāʾ), one to which bodies do not submit passively, but through which they cultivate ethical transformation.
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