Dilek A. Tepeli earned her master's degree at the Ruhr University Bochum in social science with an interdisciplinary focus on sociology, social and cultural psychology, and social anthropology, methodologically with an emphasis on qualitative social research. She studied the study program "Culture and Person" and already dealt with intercultural relations during her studies as well as theoretically with the social construction of foreignness and outsiderness. A central theme running through her research is the importance of stigmatization processes for internal, psychological processes in subjects and how damage to identity and denied recognition and affection can contribute to affective relational and attachment blockages in a person's self-world relationship. She is also concerned with effects of conflictual intergroup relationships and how these can affectively and cognitively weave into personal attachments and relationships and also contribute to attachment barriers. Thus, of interest to her from a theoretical and empirical perspective are psychological and symbolic violence, as well as experiences of exclusion and injury by individuals and groups, and the risks of injury in interaction and communication that arise with these.
From December 2016 to May 2020, she was a doctoral candidate and research assistant in the Research Training Group "Religious Plurality and its Regulation in the Region (RePliR)" at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) in Bochum. Her doctoral project examines the identity constructions and intergroup relations of young Alevis and Sunnis against the backdrop of collective relations of violation from a cultural psychological, figuration sociological and theatrical sociological perspective. She is also particularly interested in the practical transfer of social science knowledge with the aim of improving the coexistence of diverse groups in the superdiverse immigration society. Thus, one of her research interests is to find a constructive way of dealing with affectively occupied conflicts and to recognize them as an essential part of social reality. From 2020-2021, she worked as a research associate in a project affiliated to the DFG project "Cultural Spaces of Psychological Knowledge. Parent-Child Relationships from the Perspective of German and Turkish Parents" sub-study on parent-child attachments and parenting styles of fathers under the direction of Dr. Anna Sieben at the Chair of Social Theory and Social Psychology. Subsequently, she participated, also under the direction of Anna Sieben, in the qualitative sub-study investigating subjective everyday theories of mass panic and the behavior of people in crowds at the Research Center Jülich. Since 04/2022 she is responsible together with Jürgen Straub for the management of the BMBF funded research project "Network Local Conflicts and Emotions in Urban Spaces" (LoKoNet) for transdisciplinary conflict research in science-practice cooperation. In the Bochum subproject, the role of strong negative, but also positive affects in the emergence and processing of social conflict dynamics in urban society will be investigated, which are related, for example, to cultural diversity, political tensions, and local conflicts in neighborhoods.
A list of publications of Dilek Tepeli can be found here.
Dilek A. Tepeli, M.A.
Ruhr-University Bochum
Faculty of Social Science
Chair of Social Theory and Social Psychology
Building GD, E1/211
Universitätsstr. 150
D-44801 Bochum
Tel.: +49 (0)234 32 - 19669
E-Mail: aysel.tepeli@rub.de