PEN Turkey grants Duygu Asena Women's Rights Award to Prof. Ayşe Buğra

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PEN Turkey Writers' Association has granted its annual Duygu Asena Women's Rights Award to Emeritus Prof. Ayşe Buğra.

"She did not change her usual prudent and humble attitude in the face of the attacks against her personality and gave a lesson of humanity, conscience and decency by saying 'I am sorry for my country'," the association said in explaining why it awarded Buğra.

Prof. Buğra was targeted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in relation to the protests against his appointment of a rector to Boğaziçi University.

"The wife of the person who is called Osman Kavala and is the representative of [George] Soros is among these provocateurs," Erdoğan said on February 5, accusing Buğra of inciting the protests.

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"We present the 2021 PEN Duygu Asena Award with love and respect to Prof. Dr. Ayşe Buğra, who set an example with her existence, studies, books, attitude and identity of an educator and a scientist," said PEN.

"Ayşe Buğra is a world-class scholar of ours who won the 2015 World Social Sciences Award.

"We are going through a period where the concept of the university is being emptied more and more every day, the education system of our country is drifting away from contemporary and universal values, academic independence is under threat, the principles of the Republic are compromised, and steps of a counter-revolution is being tried to be implemented.

"In this period, Ayşe Buğra, who has the most respected place in the world scientific community, continued devoting herself to her students and educating them despite all the hardships and obstacles she faced.

"Again, in this period, she was subjected to insults, slanders and threats from the political authority, she was targeted and attempted to be humiliated. Her personal rights were attacked, she was wanted to pay a price as a Republican Intellectual and a woman.

The award is named after Duygu Asena, a late feminist writer who pioneered the women's movement in Turkey in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

One of her novels, "Woman Has No Name" (Kadının Adı Yok) reached wide audiences and was banned in 1988 because of "obscenity."

The first Duygu Asena Award was given to journalist İpek Çalışlar in 2007.

About Ayşe Buğra

Emeritus Prof. Ayşe Buğra completed her Ph.D. in economics at McGill University. She is a professor of political economy at the Ataturk Institute of Modern Turkish History of Boğaziçi University in İstanbul and is the co-founder and the current director of the research center Social Policy Forum at the same university.

Her current research interests include comparative social policy and gender relations, international development and business history. Her last book is entitled New Capitalism in Turkey: The Relationship between Politics, Religion and Business (co-authored with Osman Savaşkan, Edward Elgar publishing 2014).

Her other books in English include State and Business in Modern Turkey (State University of New York Press 1994), State, Market and Organizational Form (co-edited with Behlül Üsdiken, Walter de Gruyter 1997) and Trajectories of Female Employment in the Mediterranean (co-edited with Yalçın Özkan, Palgrave MacMillan 2013).

Her articles in the area of social policy in general and female employment patterns, in particular, have been published in such journals as Social Politics, European Journal of Social Policy, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Development and Change, Middle East Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and New Perspectives on Turkey. Ayşe Buğra is the translator of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation into Turkish.

(EMK/VK)