Şule Yaylacı, Liu Scholar and PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science as well as Lily Ivanova, Liu Scholar and Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at UBC were recently recognized as Yale-UBC Fox Fellows.
The Yale-UBC Fox International Fellows Program is designed to enhance mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and other countries by promoting international scholarly exchanges and collaborations among the next generation of leaders. To accomplish this goal, the program seeks to identify and nurture those students who are interested in harnessing scholarly knowledge to respond to the world’s most pressing challenges.
We asked Şule and Lily to reflect on their research, their motivations for applying, and what they hope to achieve as a Yale-UBC Fox Fellow:
Şule Yaylaci
I earned my BSc in Political Science and Public Administration at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara Turkey, and my MSc in Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. I am currently a doctoral candidate at UBC, and my research examines the impact of organized intrastate political violence on the political culture in democratic settings. Employing a mixed methodology, I am working to identify the causal relationship between bystanding political violence and the attitudes and beliefs of citizens towards democracy. The cases for the qualitative analysis are Turkey and Peru.
Why I applied to program
During my fieldwork, I garnered valuable data, which help me understand the dynamics of state-citizen relationships in contexts shadowed by security concerns and lack of peace. UBC-Yale Fox Fellowship program is very pertinent to my studies with its focus on fostering peace and prosperity in the world. It further offers the unique opportunity to expand my doctoral research through interactions with an interdisciplinary group of distinguished Fellows from many corners of the world while benefiting from the outstanding resources and facilities at Yale University.
What I hope to achieve as Fox Fellow
I am delighted and honored to be one of the UBC Fellows. Intellectual diversity brings variety of perspectives, which is essential to a robust research. As a Fox Fellow, I look forward to carrying forward my research by presenting it in workshops, discussing and crystallizing my findings as well as disseminating them to a broad network of scholars. Furthermore, spending multiple semesters at Yale University will provide me with an opportunity to develop a new professional network, and will enhance my academic engagements with its remarkable institutional capacity.
Lily Ivanova
I am a Ph.D. student in the department of Sociology at UBC. My work focuses on the transmission of morality in the context of education on genocide and human rights abuses. My Ph.D. dissertation will be a cross-national comparative of how human rights museums represent genocide, and the cultural processes through which visitors experience these sites.
I have a Master of Arts in Sociology from UBC, and a Bachelor’s in International Development and Globalization from the University of Ottawa. My Master’s research was a study of globalization and morality processes among international tourists and UN volunteers at Cambodia’s genocide memorial sites in Phnom Penh.
My extra-curricular work includes organizing for Canadian youth voter education and graduate student wellbeing at UBC.
Why I applied to program
I applied to the Fox Fellowship program with aspirations to work with international policy-minded fellow grad students from around the world, to work with leading cultural sociologists in collective memory, and to work with Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program, one of the biggest programs dedicated to genocide studies in the world, and a key actor in shaping genocide education programs internationally.
What I hope to achieve as Fox Fellow
Through the Fox Fellowship, I hope to have the opportunity to connect with leading actors in shaping genocide education internationally. Through the Fellowship, I hope to begin research on a key birthplace of contemporary genocide commemoration practices, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. In the spirit of public sociology, I hope to bring these insights back to the Canadian context, where sites like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights continue to expand forums for discussing human rights abuses in Canada and abroad.
