Who We Are
Olga Demetriou, Senior Research Associate
Olga Demetriou completed a Ph.D. (LSE) thesis in 2002. She has since carried out research at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Her current research, which focuses on the process of political subjectivisation in Cyprus, explores the interface between political theory and anthropology, the ethnography of conflict, human rights in theory and practice, and the politics of gender and gender-based violence.
Karolina Vinakurava, Research Associate
Karolina Vinakurava holds a BSc degree in Psychology and is currently completing her Master’s in Clinical Psychology at Intercollege. She has worked as the senior educational consultant and student advisor at Global Education Services for the last seven years. Karolina also volunteered at the Hostel for Teenage Girls in Nicosia, where she provided psychological support and conducted a wide range of empowering activities for young girls. Her research interests include feminist counseling, gender perspective in diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders, impact of gender on female drug users and its implications for treatment, identity construction and personal adjustment among Eastern European women trafficked for sexual exploitation.
Project Involvement in: Grundtvig 2 – Young Women Fit for Politics!
Chrystalla Ellina, Senior Research Associate
Chrystalla Ellina holds an undergraduate degree in History from the University of Orlèans, France and a graduate degree in History from the University of Lyon, France. She has a master’s and doctorate degrees in Political Science from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in the United States Her research interests include gender policies, international institutions, European Union social policy, research methodology, women and politics, and comparative public policy.
Krini Kafiris, Senior Research Associate
Krini Kafiris holds a doctorate in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex, UK. She is a research associate of the Political Communication Laboratory, University of Athens and also teaches media and communications studies. Her research interests include gender, media and popular culture, ICTs, and the relationship between media, space/place, and identity.
Spurgeon Thompson, Research Associate
Dr. Spurgeon Thompson is Chair of the Department of Humanities at Cyprus College and holds degrees from Tulane and Syracuse Universities. Having completed his doctoral work at the University of Notre Dame, USA, in literary and cultural studies, he has published articles on cultural politics, feminist literary recovery work, and on the intersection of race, class, gender, and national oppressions in Cultural Studies, Interventions, other academic journals. A poet and editor, he founded the bi-annual Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus in 2003.
Hanife Aliefendioglu, Research Associate
Hanife Aliefendioglu graduated from the Sociology Department of Hacettepe University in 1987. She was awarded her MA degree by the Department of Anthropology in Hacettepe University for her thesis entitled Gender Difference in Spoken Language in 1994. She was awarded a Research Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Cross Cultural Research on Women and received her PhD degree from Hacettepe University’s Department of Anthropology in 2000. Since September 2001 she has been teaching at Eastern Mediterranean University’s Faculty of Communication and Media Studies.
Yetin Arslan, Research Associate
Yetin Arslan completed her BA degree in Radio, TV and Film Studies and then her MA degree in the field of Communication and Media Studies at the Eastern Mediterranean University. Her masters thesis was based on “Re-construction of the Turkish Cypriot Sense of Self in Selected Newspapers in North Cyprus”. She is a doctoral student and a research assistant in the Communication and Media Studies department at EMU.
