Petek Onur

Primære forskningsområder

Islam and gender, nostalgia, urban culture, neo-Ottomanism, media, Islamism in Turkey, Turkish communities in Denmark

Kort præsentation

Petek Onur is a sociologist. She received her PhD from Department of Sociology at Middle East Technical University, Turkey with the thesis entitled “Changing Discourse on Women and Islam in Turkey in Ethnographic Studies”. The thesis was published by Palgrave Macmillan with the title Ethnographic Discourses on Women and Islam in Turkey: A Critical Reading (2024).

She received Sabancı University, Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence, 2018 Şirin Tekeli Research Award with her research “Yeni Osmanlı Kına Geceleri ve Saray Nostaljisi içinde Kadınlar” (“New Ottoman Henna Nights and Women in Palace Nostalgia”).

She is the author of “The Politics of Nostalgia: The New Urban Culture in Ankara’s Historic Neighbourhoods” in The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Turkey edited by P. Hecker, I. Furman and K. Akyıldız, published by Edinburgh University Press (2022).

Her project “Gendered Nostalgia: Neo-Ottomanism in Islamist Women’s Media in Turkey” was funded by EC Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships, and hosted by the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (CCRS) and The Many Roads in Modernity Research Centre. 

In these three research projects following the PhD, she investigated multiple forms of contemporary nostalgia in Turkey, largely focusing on the gendered aspects of neo-Ottoman nostalgia.

Currently, she is part of the research group "Pious Practices among Danish Muslims: Diversity, Devotion and Aesthetics" funded by DFF, Independent Research Fund Denmark. Her research project "The Story behind the Wedding: Piety Codes in Union Formation among Turkish Communities in Denmark" investigates the role of religious norms, cultural traditions, family values and emotions in the process of union formation among immigrant communities from Turkey in Denmark.

She co-founded the Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster at CCRS and has been teaching in the fields of sociology of Islam and religion, culture and society.