Elif Nur Duman-Cogen

Elif is an Assistant Professor of Management at Newcastle University Business School. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who brings together management, anthropology, and political science to understand the working lives of refugees. Her research focuses on the lives, agency, and life-making practices of refugees and migrants, particularly within contexts shaped by war, forced migration, and precarity in the Global South.

Elif holds 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, she worked as an NGO professional in Turkey and Afghanistan.

Elif is an ethnographer who explores the lived worlds of refugee women. Through ethnographic research with Syrian refugee women in Turkey, she explores 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 practices. She explores the feelings, senses, voices, silences, values, and ways of reasoning of these women to understand how they re-establish their selves in post-war circumstances.

Elif argues 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. Elif contributes to academia and policy by highlighting forms of life that are often overlooked, yet equally important and meaningful as those lived in 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.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00187267251355394

Teaching

Elif has been teaching undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students over the past four years. She has taught modules including:

Managing Change in Organisations (MSc), Newcastle University
Research Methods (UG), Newcastle University
Understanding Work and Organisations (UG), Newcastle University
Managing Change (UG), Newcastle University
Introducing Strategic Management (MSc), University of Bristol
Qualitative Methods for Management I (PhD), University of Bath
Leading and Managing Change (MSc and UG), University of Bath
Research Methods (UG), University of Bath
People and Organisations (UG), University of Bath

Elif has also tutored and mentored first-year PhD students, supporting them in selecting appropriate research methodologies and preparing ethics applications for fieldwork.

Awards

‘Most Thought-Provoking PhD Student Paper’ Award
Presented at the Qualitative Research in Management (QRM) Conference in Albuquerque, USA, for the paper “How Syrian Refugee Domestic Workers Reconstitute Themselves as Ethical Subjects,” 2023

Santander Postgraduate Mobility Award, University of Bath, 2024

University Research Studentship Award (URSA), PhD Studentship, University of Bath, 2020–2023

Full Scholarship, University of Toronto (MA in Political Science), 2015–2016

Conference

Co-organiser of the annual Feminist Philosophy Conference. At the conference, which explored the work of feminist philosophers including Judith Butler and Jessica Benjamin, Elif presented on the work of Saba Mahmood and how her ideas help advance organisational theory.

Community-building: Refugee and Migration Research Network (RAMnet)

With my colleague Nosheen Khan, I 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 spans multiple forms of migration, with a particular commitment to advancing understandings and critical approaches to refugee and migrant experiences. RAMnet now includes 33 members across 16 universities in the UK and internationally. Further activities and events will be announced soon.

Some beauty, some inspiration

Spring’s Favourite

Charles Hirschkind’s The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia takes one’s soul to Andalusia, where one wanders through its streets, feeling the warm breeze on one’s cheeks. Inspired by Wittgenstein, Hirschkind notes that “our lives may be oriented to certain pasts, attached to them, in ways that unsettle, disturb, captivate, or otherwise affect us” p. 21), pasts that are “points of vulnerability where life exceeds our reflexive grasp of it” (p. 21). Through what he calls “historical therapeutics”—“the excavation of a buried past” (p. 3)—the past becomes inseparable from a present structured by conditions of power. The past lives within and through us—in our cells, or, in the case of a geography, within its streets and treasured artefacts, perhaps in many other forms that we can't name.

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