My journey began as a linguistics researcher analysing newspapers through corpus-driven methods at Lancaster University. What started as studying language patterns evolved into a passion for teaching students how to critically read and analyse media in our digital age. Over the past decade, I've transformed from a researcher examining media discourse to an educator empowering students with the practical skills to understand and create media content.

My teaching philosophy centres on hands-on, project-based learning. In my Communication Studies and Media Analysis course (NMC 314), I don't just lecture about content analysis or sentiment analysis—students work with real datasets, use industry-standard tools like Gephi and NodeXL, and build portfolios of work that demonstrate their analytical capabilities. I believe media education should bridge academic rigour with professional readiness, preparing students not just to understand media theory but to thrive in dynamic media careers.

Today, whether supervising MA students to completion, coordinating an EU-funded curriculum programme, or leading workshops on digital research methods, I remain committed to student-centred, industry-engaged pedagogy. I see media education as a bridge—connecting critical thinking with creative production, academic insight with professional practice, and diverse learners with meaningful career pathways.

I welcome PhD students interested in the following research areas:

• Digital Media and Political Communication: Platform-mediated discourse, social media and political mobilisation, digital activism, online public spheres
• Migration and Refugee Studies: Media representations of migration, digital narratives of displacement, border technologies, humanitarian communication
• Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis: Large-scale media analysis, computational discourse methods, critical discourse analysis, framing analysis
• Middle East Media and Society: Turkish politics and media, conflict representation, crisis communication, governance in MENA contexts
• Digital Research Methods: Content analysis, sentiment analysis, network analysis, netnography, computational social science

I am particularly interested in supervising interdisciplinary projects that combine critical theory with empirical methods, and research that addresses contemporary challenges in digital media, migration, and political communication.