Demet Arpacık received her PhD in 2020 from the Language, Culture, and Context strand of the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She holds an MA in Educational Leadership and Administration from Boston College (USA) and a BA in Early Childhood Education and Psychological Guidance and Counseling from Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey).

Her doctoral dissertation examined Kurdish language activism in Turkey as a key site of colonial governance, political struggle, and everyday resistance. This work was awarded the Joshua Fishman Dissertation Award in Sociolinguistics in 2021 and subsequently published as the monograph Beyond Language: Kurdish Language Activism in the Face of Colonial Language Governmentality.

Prior to joining CRG, Dr. Arpacık worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Plurilingualism, University of Fribourg (Switzerland), where she studied governmental minority language policies. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on multilingualism and the sociology of education at several colleges within the City University of New York since 2016.

Her research lies at the intersection of sociology, education, linguistic anthropology, and political science. It focuses on the cultural and linguistic dimensions of governing minority populations, with particular attention to colonial and postcolonial regimes of governmentality and the forms of resistance they engender.

At CRG, she is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the project “Sovereign Performance,” where her work examines the performative politics of sovereignty in the Kurdistan region.