Elif Nur Duman-Cogen

Elif is an anthropologist based in management and organisation studies. She focuses on one of the most pressing challenges of our time: war and forced migration. Elif explores the lives of those shaped by conflict and displacement, with a particular focus on how female refugees rebuild their lives after war, trauma, and exile. Her research examines the forms of agency exercised by Syrian refugee women in Turkey, exploring how they re-establish honourable lives while working in precarious, informal labour markets. More broadly, Elif’s scholarship explores ‘refugee’ working lives, embodiment, cultural and religious forms of agency, stigma, dirty work, and the experiences of ‘people-who-move’. Her philosophical inquiry focuses on subject formation – the processes of becoming shaped through the multiple attachments that constitute our being.

Elif conducted eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul to explore how Syrian women who had never engaged in paid work prior to the war became domestic workers and cleaners as a result of forced migration. Her research found that such work is doubly stigmatised within their community, leading many women to remain silent about their work. Elif accessed 76 “hard-to-reach” Syrian domestic workers and cleaners and conducted in-depth interviews and observations. She also interviewed 23 employers and 12 NGO workers and activists, offering an understanding of newly emerging employment relationships in the refugee context, as well as new worker and employer identities in the Global South.

Elif seeks to advance the emerging field of refugee studies in MOS. Elif’s future research will trace the lives of Syrian refugee women in Turkey, as well as those who return to Syria following the fall of the Assad regime. She aims to explore how Syrians develop new forms of work and entrepreneurial identities in post-war Syria, examining the ways they “re-rebuild” their honourable lives after fourteen years of refugee experience.

Elif's first sole-author paper has been published in Human Relations, and a previous version of this paper received "The Most Thought-Provoking PhD Award" from the Management Learning Journal at the Qualitative Research in Management and Organization Conference in 2023 in the USA.

Prior to joining academia, Elif worked as an NGO professional in Turkey and Afghanistan.