Dilara Çalışkan is a LGBTI+ rights activist in Turkey and a PhD candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and The Initiative for the Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . She is a graduate student fellow of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. In 2014, she graduated from Sabancı University’s Cultural Studies Master’s Program with a thesis titled “Queer Mothers and Daughters: The Role of Queer Kinship in the Everyday Lives of Trans Sex Worker Women in Istanbul.” Her reviews and essays have been published in the American Ethnologist, the European Journal of Women's Studies and Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press). Her dissertation focuses on trans and queer forms of memory transmission and relatedness in Turkey.