Dr. Özlem Canyürek
أوزلم جانيورك
PhD

Dr Özlem Canyürek is a sociologist working at the intersection of cultural policy, politics and education. Her work engages with marginalised knowledges, embodied narratives, aesthetic practices, artistic resilience and non-institutionalised forms of cultural production. She holds a PhD from the Department of Cultural Policy at the University of Hildesheim. Her dissertation, Cultural Diversity in Motion. Rethinking Cultural Policy and Performing Arts in an Intercultural Society, was funded by the European Open Science Cloud and offers a critical intervention into dominant frameworks of cultural policy in Germany.

Özlem Canyürek conducts independent research, facilitates lectures and workshops and contributes as a jury member and consultant to cultural programmes across Germany and beyond. Her research for the German Performing Arts Fund (2021) and ASSITEJ Germany (2023) critically examines the structural limits of institutional diversification processes and foregrounds practice-informed, pluriversal approaches to cultural policy.

Her current work deepens the dialogue between artistic and academic knowledge-making through processes of de-institutionalisation, with a particular focus on solidarity as a method of resistance. She engages with the archive as a contested space of knowledge and memory, exploring its potential in decolonising dominant epistemologies and rethinking knowledge transfer beyond Eurocentric narratives. She was involved in the تواصل [Tawasol] Cultural Production and Policy Network as a mentor, supporting transcultural exchange through reciprocal learning and plural ways of knowing. Within the international training project Reframing Colonial Legacies (Zeppelin University and University of Cape Coast, 2025-2026), funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), she contributes to horizontal knowledge exchange and reflections on the epistemic conditions of transcultural collaboration.

She is co-editor of Decolonial Cultural Practices: Towards Pluriversal Cultural Institutions and Policies (Routledge, 2025) and the forthcoming volume Critiques and Asymmetries of Power: Music and Performing Arts (mdwPress, 2026). She is also a member of the European Sociological Association (ESA) and ASSITEJ Germany.