Please join us for the next CPPR seminar on 17 February from 1-2pm in WBW G/8. No registration necessary, just come along!

Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment: A Comparative Approach to British and French Aid Structures (2025), investigates how self-identified feminist or women’s organisations in the asylum and charity sectors in the United Kingdom and France attach meanings to and address refugee women’s “empowerment” in their operations and how these perpetuate or disrupt global hierarchies.  Adopting a decolonial, feminist and intersectional approach, it provides a nuanced assessment on how refugee assistance should move beyond the dominant “vulnerability versus empowerment” dichotomy. Acknowledging how some of the current practices still impose vulnerability on women, it contributes to the newly established literature exploring how refugeehood and asylum-seeking are not necessarily disempowering for women, as they can provide new opportunities for negotiating gender norms, supporting women to practice political agency. 

Questions? Contact CPPR seminar series organisers Dr Alanah Mortlock or Dr Francesa Meloni.

Please email Alanah or Francesca if you'd like to attend the seminar as an external guest.

Meet the speaker

Dr. Zeynep Kilicoglu is an LSE Fellow in Gender and International Politics in the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. She conducts feminist research on migration and forced displacement. Her work investigates how humanitarian and aid organizations in the UK and France construct the subjectivities of refugee women, with particular attention to how these organizations ascribe specific meanings to “empowerment” and whether they are able to provide opportunities for supporting women’s political agency, authorship, and visibility. She works closely with activist networks, and her epistemological approach involves using ethnographic methods to co-create academic knowledge in partnership with migrant communities.