Filiz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, with an expected completion date of June 2017. She is also a graduate fellow at the Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS).

Filiz’s research centers on human rights law and labor activism. Labor activists around the world are increasingly turning to international law and human rights in order to renew focus on precarious working conditions and restrictions on unionization. Her dissertation, Claiming Labor Rights as Human Rights: Legal Mobilization at the European Court of Human Rights, provides a comprehensive analysis of the causes and consequences of mobilizing labor rights at an international human rights court. Analyzing the legal mobilization of labor activists at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Filiz argues that this move from the domestic to the supranational arena has altered governance of employment relations, transformed mobilization strategies, and led to an expansion of human rights law.

As part of her research agenda, Filiz created an original database of labor cases brought before the ECtHR (n=917) to examine whether and how the Court’s jurisprudence on labor rights has expanded over the years. She recruited, trained, and supervised a team of 14 undergraduate students to construct this database. Moreover, in order to better understand the local dynamics of activism, she conducted a 16-month fieldwork in Turkey and the UK.

Work from this research is forthcoming in Law and Social Inquiry and in an edited volume on human rights from University of Toronto Press. Filiz has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants, including the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, the David J. Olson Graduate Fellowship for Labor Studies, the EU Center of Excellence Graduate Research Grant, the Chester A. Fritz and Boeing Fellowships for International Research and Study, and Individual Research Grant from the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. Her work is also recognized by the Stuart Scheingold Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper in Public law.