Cigdem Esin is a lecturer in Psychosocial Studies. She completed her PhD at UEL. Her doctoral research was on sexual constructions in the narratives of educated young women and their mothers in modern Turkey.Her research interests are in interactions between individual stories and grand socio-cultural narratives, and interconnections between gender, power and politics within historically specific contexts. She has been working in research projects on gender, employment, women's movements and organisations and sexuality since the mid-1990s. Her current research explores the self narratives of academic immigrants living in London, with a focus on the shifts in these narratives in relation to the multiple social-political contexts in which academic immigrants position themselves.

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• Life stories
• Narrative Research
• Constructions of gender
• Interconnections between gender, power and politics
• Feminist Methodologies
• Visual narratives
• Narratives of translation within research practice 

• Psychosocial Studies

• PS 3000-3001 Dissertation Modules
• PS 1205 Key Concepts and Debates in Psychosocial Studies
• PS 2207 Consumption and Consumer Behaviour
• PS 2202 Individual and Society
• ISM 301 Narrative Research

Publications:

• Narrative Analysis: the Constructionist Approach (forthcoming in 2013) together with Mastoureh Fathi and Corinne Squire  in Sage Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis, Uwe Flick (ed)

• What is Narrative Research (forthcoming in 2013) together with Squire, C., Harrison, B., Hyden, M., Hyden, L.C. and Davis, M., Bloomsbury Academic: London.

• ‘Visual autobiographies in East London: Narratives of still images, interpersonal exchanges, and intrapersonal dialogues’ (under revision) Forum: Qualitative Social Research together with Corinne Squire

• ‘Esin, C. (2011) ‘Narrative Analysis Approaches’ in N. Frost (Ed.) Qualitative Research Methods in Psychology: Combining Core Approaches, Open University Press: Buckingham.
• Esin, C. (2011) Review of Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Lives and Historical Experience 2007 by Roxana Waterson (ed.), Asian Journal of Social Sciences.
• Esin, C. (2011) Review of Shifting Polarized Positions: A Narrative Approach in Teacher Education 2009 by Xin Li, Carola Conle and Freema Elbaz Luwisch, Gender and Education, 23 (3).
• Frost, N., Holt, A., Shelbourne, P., Esin, C., Nolas, S-M., Mehdizadeh, L. and Brooks-Gordon, B. (2011) ‘Collective Findings, Individual Interpretations: An Illustration of a Pluralistic Approach to Qualitative Data Analysis’, Qualitative Research in Psychology, Vol. 8, Issue. 1. pp. 93-113.
• Frost, N., Nolas, S-M., Brooks-Gordon, B., Esin, C., Holt, A., Shelbourne, P., and Mehdizadeh, L. (2010) 'Pluralism in Qualitative Research: the impact of different researchers and qualitative approaches on the analysis of qualitative data'. Qualitative Research Vol.10, No. 4. pp.1.-20.

Current Research Activities:

• I am a Research Fellow at the Centre for Narrative Research
• I have been collaborating with a team of qualitative researchers in Pluralism in Qualitative Research (PQR) project. This study has been running since 2006. The principal researcher of the project is Dr Nollaig Frost, Middlesex University. The team has organised two national symposia for qualitative researchers from the UK and Europe. Several publications about using multiple qualitative research methods have been made as a product of this project.
• I have been working with Corinne Squire and Chila Kumari Burman in ‘You Are Here’: East London Self-Portraits project. The project investigated visual and verbal self-representations across a range of East London environments.

Selected Conference Presentations

• Disciplined Negotiations: Listening to Sexual Stories of Educated Women in Ankara’, Invited Seminar, Hacettepe University, Women’s Research and Implementation Centre, Ankara, April 2011
• 'Visual Autobiographies from East London and their destinations' together with Corinne Squire, presented at The Travelling Concept of Narrative II, International and Interdisciplinary Symposium, London, November 2010.
• Disciplined Femininities, Sexual Armours: Telling Stories beyond Modernist National Narratives presented at ISA World Congress of Sociology, Gothenburg, Sweden, July 2010.
• 'Uncovering the Layers: Analysing the Sexual Narratives of Women in Turkey' presented at Narrative Research Workshop organised by Linkoping University in Sweden, June 2009.
• 'Technologies of Gender in the Sexuality Narratives of Well-Educated Young Women in Turkey' presented at Gender 2007-East Meets West Conference, York, July 2007.
• 'The Unbearable Heaviness of Contexts and Conversations: Working with Sexuality Narratives of Women in Turkey' presented at BSA 2007 Annual Conference, London, April 2007.
• 'I’m not a ‘good girl’ anymore': Self-construction in the sexuality stories of young women in Turkey” invited paper to be presented at New Femininities - An International Conference, Postgraduate Forum, London, January 2007.
• '‘Am I One of Them?’: A Narrative on Doing a Sexuality Research with Women in Turkey” presented at Researching Lives: multi-disciplinary approaches in life history research, auto/biography and narrative research University of Sussex, Brighton, June 2006.
  
  

• Esin. C. 2007  Review of Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America 2000 by Gelya Frank, Feminist Review. Vol 85. pp.131-33. 
• Esin, C. & Kurt, A.S. 2006. 'Multiple Ways of ‘Giving Back’ among Immigrant Women in the UK'  Research Report in A. Rindoks and E. Vonk (eds.) Migrant Women’s Philanthropic Practices from the Diaspora, Amsterdam. pp.35-46.