RESEARCH FELLOWS

Hande Gür is a PhD student at the University of Alberta, Department of Anthropology with a specialization in the anthropology of Islam, spirituality, gender, and religious and social movements. Her doctoral research is an ethnographic study of the rise of Sufi—or mystical Islamic— practices among mainly young, middle-class women of Turkish origin living both in Turkey and in the West. Gür brings to this research a solid record of academic research and publishing, including her M.S. thesis (METU, 2018) on contemporary Mevleviye in Turkey, and M.A. dissertation (Hacettepe Institute of Population Studies, 2020). that was focused on using sequential mixed methods in the study of spirituality. Hande Gür published her first solo article on this research in the Journal of Empirical Theology in 2020 and co-wrote a Turkish book entitled  “Spiritual Seeking in Turkey” (Türkiye’de Spiritüel Arayışlar) in 2021. Currently Hande Gür is a graduate research fellow of the Non-Religious Beliefs and Practices in Turkey (NBPT) research project.