Emek Cayli Rahte is an associate professor in the Department of Radio, Television and Cinema at Hacettepe University Faculty of Communication. She is a visiting researcher at Södertön University, Department of Media and Communication Studies.

She is the editor and cofounder of the international peer-reviewed cultural studies journal: Moment Journal. Also, she is the cofounder and the editorial board member of Turkey's first academic queer studies journal KAOSQ+. She was a visiting scholar at Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Educational Studies. She made her postdoctoral research on critical media literacy, children's media Culture and visual methodologies there. She taught a variety of BA, MA and PhD courses such as "Gender and Media", "Cultures of Masculinities", and "Media Ethnography." She supervised MA theses and PhD dissertations in subjects and areas such as children and media, reality TV, audience studies, gender and media, and press freedom. Her research interests are ethnography, audience studies, feminist theory and critical cultural studies. She is the co-writer of the book Freedom of Expression in Turkey: 2001-2011. She had completed a research project about the reception of Turkish TV dramas in the Balkans. In connection with her interest in Balkan culture, she also published an article about Balkan Cinema entitled "Straightening The "Winding Drina": Heroism, Evil and Forgiveness In The Film Krugovi".

She came to Stockholm in January 2022 as a guest researcher at the Department for Media and Communication Studies, School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University. She works with Professor Anne Kaun.

Her current project title is "Cultural Hybridity, Global Imagination, and Transnational Encounters: Audience Reception of Turkish TV Dramas in Sweden". Her project is granted a 12-month postdoctoral research fellowship by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBİTAK). Her research project reflects her interest in Nordic- Turkish cultural encounters.

The main discussion of her research is around the relationship between the Turkey image of the Turkish and Nordic audience in the context of the "diasporic audience", the audience's image of Turkey in the context of the "cultural other", and the audience's imagination of Turkey shaped by TV series. In the research, to interpret the cultural and social scheme in the mind of the audience, the connection between "real" encounters with other people during the routines of everyday life, the extended forms of 'mediated' encounters that play an increasing role in the media-saturated reality will be examined. In the field research to be carried out in Sweden, the "dominant", "negotiated" and "oppositional" reading practices in making sense of the stories told in the series and the self-reflective dialogues established with the text will be revealed with a holistic view of the everyday life of the audience. Although the focus of the field is the reception of Turkish TV series, an answer will be sought to the question of how the participants read Nordic TV dramas as well. Thus, it will be possible to make a comparative analysis of how the national, transnational, collective, and subjective elements of cultural encounters are synthesized in the imaginary world of the viewer.