Her research interrogates the archives of international law to trace how coloniality has shaped the formation and operation of the international legal order in its engagement with slavery. Her focus is on the conceptual and legal marginalization of the enslavement of women in the Global South. In this spirit, her teaching activities at York University’s Department of Social Science center on gender and the law. She holds a Bachelor of Laws from Brunel University in London, United Kingdom, and a Master of Laws from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
After some years in the private sector, where she eventually held a leadership role at a legal technology company, she returned to academia and completed a second Master of Laws at Osgoode Hall Law School, for which she received numerous scholarships. Since the commencement of her doctoral studies, she has presented at international conferences, conducted German-language research for a SSHRC-funded project on colonial genocide, which she also co-authored a report on, and she has a forthcoming chapter with UCL Press on a post-colonial reimagining of enslavement in international criminal law.
Her pursuit of scholarship is deeply shaped by her experiences as a Kurdish refugee. She therefore approaches her academic endeavors with an awareness of the tension between the letter of the law and the everyday realities of peoples. She has extensive experience as a rights advocate, and advisor working with refugees, as well as with women who have been subject to honor-based violence.