Film screening: 'The True Mirror: Melisa'

Sertaç Sehlikoglu is Professor of Feminist Anthropology and Muslim Societies at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity. Her research examines gender, desire, intimacy and political imagination in Muslim societies, with work in Turkey, the Balkans and the wider Middle East. She is the author of Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul (Syracuse University Press, 2021), an ethnography of women's self-making in Istanbul's women-only gyms, and was Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded TAKHAYYUL project on political imagination across Muslim-majority contexts. She is Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Islam and Reviews Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies.

Farah Al-Taji is a lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Brunel University of London and Programme Leader for the MSc Management. Through both her research and practice, she seeks to investigate and build locally grounded yet globally connected ecosystems that advance social impact and foster sustainable development. She is the Principal Investigator of the British Academy-funded project Doing Good, Growing Strong: Catalysing Economic and Social Impact in Jordan through Sustainable Social Enterprises. Beyond academia, Farah has founded and led multiple social initiatives, including WeConnect, a mental-health and community-support network launched through the Arab Innovation Network.

Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media in the Department of Media Studies, SOAS, and an advisory board member and former chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS. Her research examines intersections of politics and communication in the Arab world, with particular focus on Palestine. Her recent work addresses the genocide in Gaza through epistemic violence, media and war theories, and colonialism. She is co-editor, with Venetia Porter, of Archiving Gaza in the Present (2025), co-editor with Helga Tawil-Souri of Producing Palestine (2024) and Gaza as Metaphor (2016), and editor of What it Means to be Palestinian (2010).

Chair

Yafa Shanneik, Professor of Islam and Society at SOAS and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project RELI-GENE.

Sibel Ozasir Kacar is a Senior Assistant Professor at Radboud University’s Nijmegen School of Management, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on critical entrepreneurship studies, particularly minority entrepreneurship, migration policies, contextual approaches, and entrepreneurship and social change. Her work appears in leading journals and research handbooks. She co-chairs the ECSB Special Interest Group on Entrepreneurship and Social Change, serves as Associate Editor of Gender, Work and Organization, and sits on the editorial review boards of Entrepreneurship and Regional Development and the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research. She is also an executive producer of independent thematic festival films. Her award-winning short film, The True Mirror: Melisa, explores women's identity challenges.

Tugba Ozasir: driven by a lifelong passion for creating and sharing, Tugba has a background as an architect and design strategist. Wanting to communicate with audiences more dynamically, she turned to performance. With her sister, Dr Sibel Ozasir Kacar, she developed the short film The True Mirror: Melisa, combining academic research with performance. She holds a masters degree in performance design and practice from the University of the Arts London, where she worked as a director, creative producer and lead actress. Today she creates projects at the intersection of architecture, design and performance, including on a project titled 'Under the Curtain'.