Details
When: 16 October 2026, 2-4pm
Where: In person or Online (MS Teams)
Who can attend:
Oxford University students and staff.
Overview:
This seminar will feature three DPhil students presenting their research, offering an opportunity to hear about a range of current doctoral research projects and emerging ideas.
Each presentation will be followed by time for questions and discussion, providing a supportive space for students to share their work, receive feedback, and engage with colleagues across the research community
Speakers:
- Sumeyye Kocaman (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)
- Andrew Bramwell (English Local History)
- Camila Hidalgo Salinas (Evidence Based Health Care)
See full presentation details below for abstracts and biographies.
How to register
Students: To book your place, please complete this online form (October sessions). Please ensure you select the correct attendance option (in person or online).
Staff: Please contact the Graduate School to register by emailing gradschool@conted.ox.ac.uk.
Presentation abstracts and biographies
Sumeyye Kocaman, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Transport Capitalism: Infrastructure, Circulation, and Political Ideologies
This article is based on my work on transport capitalism as a new framework for analysing the organisation of movement as a constitutive structure of historical and contemporary globalisation. It argues that transportation has never been an auxiliary sector of industrial or digital economies but the infrastructural condition through which accumulation, governance, and ideology are materialised. Transport capitalism is rooted in seven interdependent systems: infrastructure, technology, governance, labour, ideology, energy, and ecology. Through their interaction, the organisation of motion is repeatedly reconfigured, enabling successive phases of capitalist expansion. This, however, bears new ideologies as a response, reaction, critique or support of capitalism, such as liberal imperialism, free trade liberalism, and varieties of Islamism. Reading the history of political thought through the perspective of infrastructure and circulation, this article also calls for rehistoricising political ideologies around the question of mobility.
Sumeyye is a DPhil student and works on the arrival of cars in the Ottoman territories. Her thesis proposes various theoretical concepts, including transport capitalism, the transport question, and the Scramble for the Mediterranean. Her work sits at the intersection of modern history, human and transport geography, the sociology of state-building and technology studies. She worked as the managing editor of Populism & Politics, a journal of the Populism Studies Centre, and the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law. Sumeyye has an MA in Islamic Studies from UCLA and another MA in Ottoman Poetry from Istanbul University.
![Cars of Liberty: “Look at the car of the devil! No, brother, these are the cars of liberty. Because they appeared after liberty [1908 constitutional order]”; Dalkavuk, 28 November 1908.](https://lifelong-learning.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Cars-of-Liberty-300x149.jpg)
Image: Cars of Liberty: “Look at the car of the devil! No, brother, these are the cars of liberty. Because they appeared after liberty [1908 constitutional order]”; ‘Dalkavuk’, 28 November 1908.
Andrew Bramwell, English Local History
Lancaster County Asylum in 1904: patients, family and community in an English town.
Lancaster Asylum was the size of a small town, a dynamic, complex community of 2000 patients and 500 staff. This research explores the experiences of a cohort of male and female patients, admitted to Lancaster County Asylum in 1904. It examines the patient’s background, family, diagnosis, treatment and outcomes from the perspective of the asylum as a community. The experiences of the asylum staff, both medical and domestic, the social interactions between patients and the individuals who cared for them, and the social and economic connections to the local community are an integral part of this research. The role of families in admission and discharge processes, lay and professional understanding of mental illness, are examined within the context of Elaine Showalter’s ‘psychiatric Darwinism and Anne Digby’s contention that asylums became increasingly authoritarian at the turn of the twentieth century. The patient experience articulated through the analysis of asylum archives shows that families often played an important part in asylum admissions, and that patient families did not always agree with medical officers regarding the causes of mental illness.
Andrew is a member of St. Catherine’s College undertaking a DPhil in English Local History. Andrew is conducting an in-depth study of the community of Lancaster County Asylum in 1904 incorporating patients, staff, and families at a fixed period of time. Previous research has explored portrayals of mental illness in literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the role of charities in supporting physical disability in the nineteenth century. Andrew has a background in special education and mental health support.
Image: The main entrance to ‘The Annex’ of Lancaster County Asylum.
Camila Hidalgo Salinas, Evidence Based Health Care
Management decision-making in Intraductal Papillary Mutinous Neoplasms of the pancreas.
Intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMNs) are precancerous pancreatic cysts whose management requires balancing the risk of missed cancer against the harms of unnecessary surgery. Operative decisions in patients without proven cancer rely on guideline-defined risk features, which are imperfect.
This thesis uses a sequential mixed-methods design to examine surgical decision-making under uncertainty. A systematic review and bivariate meta-analysis show guideline-defined features have limited accuracy for high-grade dysplasia or invasive carcinoma. A single-centre prediction model shows routinely available clinical and laboratory parameters may add discrimination beyond established features. Because these features were derived from surgical series, an international multicentre study shows they perform differently in patients without proven cancer, the population in which they are applied. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of patient interviews will explore how patients experience uncertainty and how it shapes their preferences. These findings aim to inform guideline updates and support shared decision-making in IPMN.
