After receiving her BA from Ankara University Faculty of Communication, Ulku Doganay received master's degree in Political Science from the Middle East Technical University and a PhD from Ankara University, Department of Political Science. During her Ph.D. studies, upon gaining a scholarship from Turkish Academy of Sciences she studied at the French Press Institute of Paris II University. In 2009, she became Associate Professor in the field of Political Life and Institutions, and in 2014 she was appointed as a full professor at the Faculty of Communication of Ankara University where she worked between 1994 and 2017. In February 2017, she was purged with an emergency decree of law and banned from public service, for signing the “Academics for Peace Petition”. The legal process regarding her reinstatement at Ankara University is still ongoing.
Beside several papers on political communication, democracy and discrimination she is the author of the book Rethinking Democratic Procedures (2003, in Turkish), and among the co-authors of the books “I am not a Racist but: Discourses of Racism and Discrimination in the Press” (2011, in Turkish), Elective Democracy (2017, in Turkish), Faces of Discrimination (editor, 2018, in Turkish).
After her purge from Ankara University, she taught courses at Ankara Solidarity Academy, School of Human Rights and OFF University. Between 2019-2023 she was affiliated as a “remote scholar” at the Department of Public Policy of University of Connecticut. She is currently working as a research fellow of the Einstein Foundation at Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies and carrying out her research project in cooperation with the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy. Dr. Doğanay’s research is dedicated to the analysis of the discourses of prominent political actors in Turkey during the 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections.