Festival Arena Episode 2: Politics, Leadership and Power

Asena Günal, obtained her BS in International Relations and MA in Sociology from the Middle East Technical University. She received her PhD from Boğaziçi University in 2008 with a thesis focusing on state-citizen relations through health care policies in the Republican Turkey. She has worked as an editor at İletişim Publishing House from 1998 to 2005.  Till she took over the General Manager role of Anadolu Kültür in March 2018, she has as of 2008 acted as the programming coordinator of Depo, which is one of the arts initiatives of Anadolu Kültür.  Günal is the co-founder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship cases in the arts in Turkey and was a fellow of the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Program at Columbia University in 2014. 

Recent publications and editorial work includes ‘A City that Remembers: Space and Memory from Taksim to Sultanahmet’ (co-authored with Murat Çelikkan, Memory Center, 2019), ‘90’larda Türkiye’de Feminizm’ (Feminism in Turkey in ’90s, co-edited with Aksu Bora, İletişim, 2002) and ‘Bir Daha Asla!: Geçmişle Yüzleşme ve Özür’ (Never Again!: Apology and Coming to Terms with the Past, co-edited with Önder Özengi, İletişim, 2013). Her articles, book reviews and translations have been published on several platforms such as Toplum ve Bilim, Birikim, Feminist Politika, Amargi, Express and Virgül. Günal who has been part of the Socialist Feminist Collective, is the winner of 2019 German French Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law laureate.

As one of the founders of Women Entrepreneurs Association of Turkey, KAGİDER, Gülseren Onanç has also served as the President from 2017 to 2011. She has initiated KAGİDER’s Brussels office in 2008. She took an active role in the establishment of the Equal Opportunity Commission for Women and Men in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. She received the ‘World of Difference Award’ from the Washington-based International Alliance of Women, TIAW in 2009. Onanç served as a member of the Republican People’s Party, (CHP) between December 2010 and February 2018. She worked as Party’ s Vice President in charge of public relations.

She founded Equality, Justice and Women Platform in 2018 after organising the Women’s Equality Summit in 2017. She is the only female member from Tukey in the Transformative Women Leaders group. She continues to serve at the SES Equality and Solidarity Association that she has set up in 2019 to advocate for gender equality, reach sustainable development goals, and thus support an organized solidarity to establish a world order in which equality and peace prevail.