On 8 October 2018, PhD researcher Duygu Avci successfully defended her thesis on 'Transformative Politics in Environmental Studies'.
Her study analysed transformative politics in local environmental struggles. It advances an understanding of local environmental struggles as spaces that contain possibilities for the transformation of political subjectivities of those social actors that participate in them, and sets out to examine the factors and processes that facilitate or hinder such transformation.
She pursued this analysis by comparing two local struggles around large-scale mining development in the Intag valley of Ecuador and the Mount Ida region of Turkey, which differ with respect to how transformative they have been.