Cihan Erdal

Cihan Erdal is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. He graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. His research interests encompass various areas, including sociology of youth activism, social movements, contemporary experiences of time and temporalities, collective memory, neoliberalism, youth inequalities, citizenship education, and social justice.

His ongoing doctoral research project, titled "Resisting Neoliberalism: Investigating activist youth experiences in Europe in the 2010s and 2020s," delves into the lived experiences, embodied subjectivities, and political imaginaries of activist youth striving for radical social change in Athens, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris over the past two decades. Erdal's research aims to provide a deeper understanding of the realities and possibilities of young activists and youth-led movements challenging neoliberal, authoritarian, and right-wing populist ideologies across Europe.

In 2020, Erdal was awarded the prestigious Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) three-year Doctoral Research Award. Furthermore, in 2021, Erdal received the Hrant Dink Foundation's History and Memory Research Fund for his research project titled "Understanding the Generation of January 19th," conducted in collaboration with Dr. Öndercan Muti.

Erdal is also the founding Director of Istanbul Youth Research Center and serves as a Coordinator Teams Member. Additionally, he currently holds the position of Coordinator at the Center for Urban Youth Research at Carleton University, Canada.