Ceylan Gülnaz Quirino-Hassan

About

Ceylan is currently working on her PhD project, Rooted Resistance: How Eco-Cultural Communities Negotiate and Resist Epistemic Loss, funded by the ESRC South East Doctoral Training Arc (SEDarc) scholarship, under the supervision of Prof. Joy Zhang and Dr. Alex Hensby.

Ceylan comes from a background of multidisciplinary media and global biodiversity conservation, inspired by the intrinsic link between cultural and biological diversity. With a profound commitment to epistemic justice, she practices producing knowledge through non-extractive frameworks.

Her research investigates the intersection of cultural integrity, environmental sustainability, and food sovereignty within colonised, semi-arid areas, specifically looking at small-scale agricultural workers and Indigenous communities in Cyprus and Northeast Brazil. She aims to understand how these communities resist epistemic loss by examining their eco-cultural identities and the socio-ecological challenges they face due to historical and contemporary colonisation and environmental policies.

To co-produce knowledge with these communities, Ceylan is developing a method of eco-cultural mapping that incorporates the human, other-than-human, and more-than-human communities who live interdependently, often transcending the boundaries of nation-states. Through this work, she highlights the crucial role of situated knowledge in modern environmental management. Her research aims to build local capacity for defense from resource and knowledge extractivism, while informing policy recommendations that promote cultural shifts in governance and support food sovereignty. Ultimately, Ceylan’s comparative analysis helps us better understand how bioregional solidarity networks can foster resilience and agency against epistemic destruction, advocating for a genuinely inclusive approach to environmental governance and most importantly – developing non-extractive practices in academia.