Nazli Konya, a professor in Colby College’s Government Department, investigates contemporary critical and democratic theory, with a focus on protest politics, populism, and authoritarianism. She teaches upper-level thematic courses on protest and populism; sexuality, gender, and feminism; race and ethnicity; and mass incarceration and decarceration. Konya earned her doctorate in government (political theory) at Cornell University and received the 2023 Leo Strauss award for her book titled The Inappropriable People of Gezi. The piece takes the 2013 Gezi Protests of Turkey as its case to engage with questions of peoplehood, refusal, and power in popular mobilization, offering a new framework to study protest and popular mobilization.
