Keynote Speakers

Anna-Maija Castrén is Professor of Sociology at the University of Eastern Finland. She has published widely on the diversification of contemporary family lives and personal relationships, on family understandings, and on trajectories to family and parenthood. Her methodological expertise is in qualitative social network analysis and the (con)figurational perspective. Most recently she has studied the families of Finnish babies born outside hetero marriage, and her ongoing project focuses on young adults’ intimate futures in Finland, Portugal, and Scotland in the context of global crises. Anna-Maija is the first editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Family Sociology in Europe, published in 2021.

Nükhet Sirman is a retired anthropologist who has taught in the Department of Sociology, Boğaziçi University. She has worked and published on diverse issues such as the structure of family farms, feminist movements in Turkey, nationalism and the constitution of the modern family, the concept of honour and honour crimes, gender studies and violence against women, methodologies of oral history, studies on affect and emotions, popular culture, and TV series. She is an expert on qualitative research methods. She has also been a feminist activist throughout her academic career, starting from the Thursday Group in Ankara, and going forward with KA-DER, Amargi, The Women’s Initiative for Peace, and Feminist Solidarity for Disaster Relief. Since 2019, she has been working in Dissensus Research as a founding member and a methodology expert. The firm specializes in research on what can be called difficult topics such as violence against women, abortion and experiences of childbirth, harassment and mobbing in the performing arts, and the like.