Aslıhan Öztürk is one of the PhD candidates in Diversity Outdoors. Aslıhan conducts ethnographic fieldwork in Germany, exploring how people of colour experience outdoor hiking and climbing through their senses. Her research uses sensory ethnography to understand how belonging, exclusion, and everyday encounters are felt and negotiated in movement and environment. By focusing on embodied experiences, her work asks how race is lived not only socially and politically, but also sensorially. 

More information about Aslihan Öztürk

Aslıhan Öztürk is one of the PhD candidates in Diversity Outdoors. Aslıhan conducts ethnographic fieldwork in Germany, exploring how people of colour experience outdoor hiking and climbing through their senses. Her research uses sensory ethnography to understand how belonging, exclusion, and everyday encounters are felt and negotiated in movement and environment. By focusing on embodied experiences, her work asks how race is lived not only socially and politically, but also sensorially. 

Aslıhan holds a bachelor’s degree in History and a research master’s degree in Social Sciences, both from the University of Amsterdam. Her previous work examined the entanglements of religion, secularity, and race, exploring how embodied practices illuminate broader dynamics of power and inequality across Europe and Turkey. She co-translated the 2025 reissue of Caleidoscopic Visions: The Black, Migrant, and Refugee Women’s Movement in the Netherlands (Amsterdam University Press), and was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT). Her fellowship was jointly supported by Leiden University and Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in Istanbul, where she conducted research for her master’s thesis. 

Recent publications

Ozturk, A. (2025). Is There a Turkish Secular Body? Race, Religion, and Embodied Politics of Secularism. Religions, 16(7), 817. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16070817