Fazila Mat
Fazıla Mat is a Communcations & Media Officer at the Europe-Canada Network. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Victoria in the faculty of Political Science under the supervision of Dr. Oliver Schmidtke. Fazıla holds an MA degree in Humanities from the University of Milan and she has worked for over ten years as a journalist and commentator for Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa and other Italian and Swiss media, covering Turkish politics, EU-Turkey relations, issues concerning migration and civil society. For OBC Transeuropa she also carried out research and policy analyses on the EU-Turkey refugee deal (2017, for the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation ); media freedom in Turkey (2014 and 2018 – within EU funded projects) and academic freedom in Turkey (2018). Since 2019 she has been participating in research projects focusing in Italy, studying the funding of political parties (2019) and the relations between civil society and politics (2021). Her research interests include populism, democracy, authoritarianism, media freedom, migration and EU-Turkey relations.