Cihan Erdal is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. He graduated from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. His research interests include activist youth cultures, social movements, contemporary experiences of time and temporalities, collective memory, neoliberalism, inequalities, citizenship and social policy.

Erdal’s ongoing doctoral research project, entitled “Resisting Neoliberalism: Investigating activist youth experiences in Europe in the 2010s and 2020s” explores the lived experiences, embodied subjectivities and political imaginaries of activist youth struggling for radical social change in Athens, Berlin, Istanbul and Paris throughout the last two decades. Erdal’s research aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the actual and possible worlds of young activists and youth-led activism challenging neoliberal, authoritarian, right-wing-populist visions across Europe.

Erdal won Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) three-years Doctoral Research Award in 2020. He is currently the coordinator of Center for Urban Youth Research (Canada). In 2021, Erdal is awarded Hrant Dink Foundation’s History And Memory Research Fund for their research on “Understanding the Generation of January 19th” with Dr. Öndercan Muti.