Dr Hande Çayır

Hande Çayır works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and filmmaker in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology.

She received her MA in Journalism and Documentary Practice with a Chevening Scholarship at the University of Sussex and completed her PhD in Applied Screen Studies at the University of Warwick with a Warwick Collaborative Fellowship.

Her practice-based research, aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Reduced Inequalities and Good Health and Well-Being, examines how mental health is represented in film by centring the agency, authorship, and ownership of people with lived experience. Initially developed to co-produce films and challenge stigmatising media narratives, her project critically explores how ‘madness’ is documented and the politics of (mis)representing lived experience. Using a Mad Studies lens, she investigates institutional, co-produced, and DIY (do-it-yourself) film practices, and re-imagines autoethnographic filmmaking through ‘being with’ survivors.

Her previous research examined the politics of surname changes for women upon marriage and divorce, drawing on her own experience through a documentary film. This project, questioning the function of surname change, was later published as a monograph Documentary as Autoethnography (Vernon Press, 2020).

Currently, she is working on the AHRC-funded Archives of Solidarity: Precarity, Creativity, and Shared Future-making Across Closed Borders project as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, organising filmmaking, zine-making, and body-mapping workshops for citizens and non-citizens, while engaging in interdisciplinary discussions with scholars across the UK, Europe, and Türkiye.

Hande Çayır is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and contributes to the peer-review processes of journals such as Disability & Society and the Journal of Autoethnography. She has delivered invited talks at institutions such as the University of Nottingham and the Gender and Sexualities Institute at The New School for Social Research. She is an active member of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), where she received an Honourable Mention (2024) for her research, and she is also a recipient of the Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence (2024).

Autoethnography, creative-relational inquiry, critical disability theory, co-production, documentary studies, experimental cinema, gender studies, mad studies, migration studies, participatory action research, research ethics, visual anthropology.