Description of impact
Dr Birgan Gokmenoglu's scholarship on social movements, participatory forms of democracy, and the sociology of futures has been central to her publicly engaged activities in and beyond the UK.Dr Gokmenoglu founded the Activism, Social Movements, and Revolutions study group at the British Sociological Association (BSA) in January 2026. The group is designed as a community of practice and knowledge that seeks to engage with the social problems of our time with the people most affected by them. While a dedicated stream at the BSA annual conferences is central, the ambitions of the study group extend further. Public engagement plans include specialist workshops, summer schools, public reading groups and scholar-meets-activist events. This group is currently being set up; more information will follow after the official launch of the group at the BSA 2026 Annual Conference in April 2026.
Dr Gokmenoglu's research project on "High Speed Railway 2 (HS2): Infrastructure and Inter-Regional Inequalities", funded by the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2023-2025), produced significant results for local communities. The tentative results have been shared with the Crewe Town Council and Cheshire East Council, as well as a local neighbourhood group in London's Old Oak Common. Further analysis is underway and will be submitted for publication in The Conversation later in 2026. These interventions seek to influence public discourse on public spending and social inequalities, especially around job security in the north of England.
In October 2025, Dr Gokmenoglu was invited to the event titled "Capitalism: A Crash Course" organised by the London-based youth initiative After Collective. This event was designed as a public workshop that brought together local young people, a trade union (TEFL, part of IWW), and Copwatch, an international network of activist groups that aim to monitor and prevent police misconduct and brutality. This workshop centred around migrant workers' issues and sought to provide short- and long-term solutions.
Dr Gokmenoglu's earlier work on anti-authoritarian movements in Turkey informed a number of public interventions. For the 10th aniversary of the Gezi protests, a major social uprising in the history of modern Turkey, Birgan co-edited an open access, bi-lingual roundtable that brought together artists, community organisations, and scholars that offered a mini (self-)archive of local organisations that have emerged in relation to the protests over the last ten years (https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44922). This public conversation led to three separate media appearances organised by the Arab Studies Institute in 2023 (https://youtu.be/ZIU-d8EBkB8?t=1885; https://youtu.be/PMGmMRj0FtM?t=2715; and https://youtu.be/u371juIl8xM?t=2225).
Her co-authored article, Hope and Time Work in Dystopian Contexts: Future-Oriented Temporalities of Activism in Post-Referendum Scotland and Turkey, provided a reconceptualisation of "time work," offering a vocabulary for affected communities to sustain long-term mobilisation. This research has moved beyond theoretical debates to offer practical frameworks for "organising hope" under dystopian conditions. These efforts culminated in a public commentary in 2023 titled From the Organized Hope of 2013 to the Cruel Optimism of 2023: Generating Hope in Political Struggle, published in both English and Turkish (https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45252/From-the-Organized-Hope-of-2013-to-the-Cruel-Optimism-of-2023-Generating-Hope-in-Political-Struggle).