Melike Isleyen

About

Melike İşleyen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University. Their research interests include the mediation of gendered life and death, as well as the normalisation of violence as a gendered and racialised phenomenon, examined through decolonial, feminist, and Indigenous perspectives, with a particular focus on visual cultures of dissent.

They hold a BA in Guidance and Psychological Counselling from Boğaziçi University and an MSc in Trauma and Disaster Mental Health from Bilgi University. During their second master’s degree in Ethnic and Migration Studies at Linköping University, their work expanded from psychotherapeutic approaches to a broader understanding of healing, visual culture, and (in)justice as interconnected processes shaped by—and capable of contesting—modernity/coloniality.

Their ongoing doctoral project focuses on the coloniality of visuality and the emancipatory potential of decolonial aesthetics to challenge the logic of settler colonial elimination and fragmentation, working toward decolonial ends in Palestine and beyond.