Agency in multiple temporalities: Being Syrian women, becoming widows and refugees, remaining pious

Abstract

This paper examines the agency of twelve pious Syrian refugee widows who were living in Gaziantep, Turkey. This paper adopts the ‘relational pragmatics’ perspective, which theorizes agency as social and relational within multiple temporalities. Agency as relational pragmatics is connected to gender and religious identities, and it takes into account the refugee position women hold in relation to Turkey as the host society. Relational agency is used as a theoretical framework in this study to reveal ways in which agency unfolds for individuals whose experiences dramatically have shifted as they moved from one social structure to another. The coding of field data was performed using the MAXQDA data analysis software. Analysis of the data indicates that home and host habitus practices and meanings must be evaluated simultaneously, along with different temporalities to capture the agentic processes of pious refugees. These temporalities include an anchored past and future tied to religious scripture together with the women's past and present life courses.