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Tolga Tezcan

Tolga Tezcan
Email:  ttezcan@ufl.edu

Phone: (352) 281-4116

Office Location: 3361A Turlington Hall

Areas of Specialization: Migration, ethnicity, disability, fuzzy cognitive mapping

Tolga Tezcan is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Florida. He received his M.A in Social Policy from Middle East Technical University in 2013, and B.A. in Sociology from the same university in 2009. He worked in the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, which is the leading agency for the management, funding and conduct of research in Turkey, as a manager of Social Research Department between 2009-2014. Tezcan’s research interests are return migration, employment of people with disabilities, and fuzzy cognitive mapping method.

Selected Publications

Books:

  • Mevzuattan Uygulamaya Engelli Hakları İzleme Raporu 2013 [From Legislations to Practices Disability Rights Monitoring Report 2013] (co-edited with Sülayman Akbulut and Hakan Özgül), Istanbul: TOHAD, 2014.
  • Gebze: “Küçük Türkiye”nin Göç Serüveni [Gebze: The Migration Journey of “Little Turkey”], Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University, 2011.

Articles and Book Chapters:

  • “An Application of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps to Explore Disabled Youth of Turkey” in progress.
  • “The Complex Nature of Migration in Conceptual Level: Overlook to the Internal Migration Experience of Gebze through Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping Method”. In Elpiniki Papageorgiou (ed): Fuzzy Cognitive Maps for Applied Sciences and Engineering – From Fundamentals to Extensions and Learning Algorithms, New York: Springer, 2014.
  • Engelli Gençlerin Yurttaşlık Sınavı: “Müstakbel” Yurttaşlık ve Hudutları [Citizenship Exam of Disabled Youth: “Prospective” Citizenship and Boundaries]. In Demet Lüküslü and Hakan Yücel (eds.): Gençlik Halleri: 2000’li Yıllar Türkiye’sinde Genç Olmak [Youth Forms: Being Young in the 2000s Turkey]. Istanbul: Efil, 2013.

Research

In 2010, he served as a principal investigator of the projects entitled “Migration Mapping of Gebze” funded by the UNDP, and “Walking Mind Project: Disabled Youth” funded by EU. The sample of the migration project consisted of 1072 household questionnaires, 300 fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) interviews, and interviews with 22 headmen of neighborhoods, and 52 hometown organizations. In 2011, the outcomes of the project were published with the name of “Gebze: The Migration Journey of ‘Small Turkey’” by Istanbul Bilgi University Press which is one of the most reputable academic publishers in Turkey. Disabled youth project consisted of 12 meetings in 12 provinces in Turkey with 20 young people (10 of them disabled and 10 of them non-disabled) that related with disabled youth studies per each province. Totally, 232 participants joined the meetings. In this project, Social Policy Document About Disabled Youth was generated. The policy document served to establish coordination between the institutions which concerned with disabled youth, and the project won “The most successful project in 2011” award given by EU. This project provided theoretical and empirical observations to write a book a chapter, “Citizenship Exam of Disabled Youth” in the book of “Youth Forms: Being Young in the 2000s Turkey” and a paper, “An Application of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps to Explore Disabled Youth of Turkey” presented in The Pacific Rim International Conference on Disability and Diversity in 2015. Moreover, this project set a theoretical ground for his M.A. dissertation, “Institutional Discrimination Area: Discrimination Experienced by Disabled Employees in the Public Sector of Turkey”, which won Social Policy Prize given by Ankara University Social Policy Research and Application Centre.

He presented a paper at the conference of INTEGRATION 2.0 organized by BIGSSS in Germany in 2012. In order to reveal the historical experiences of migration that have reflections on daily practices and to identify the causal characteristics of the migration issue, he conducted 300 Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) interviews. The paper comprised the FCM theory and step-by-step instructions while analyzing complex social issues. The revised version of this paper was published as a chapter in the book “Fuzzy Cognitive Maps for Applied Sciences and Engineering” within the Springer book series in 2013.