Becoming temporarily protected, producing temporarily protecting places: how Syrian refugee women and children co-create place in Istanbul

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper examines the usefulness of the Deleuzian concepts of smooth space and stratified space while capturing the experiences of refugee women and children as non-citizens under the temporary protection regime in Istanbul. Deleuze and Guattari, in their book ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, describe smooth space as the territory of the nomads, those who do not fit in neatly into forms of identity and division. Striated space on the other hand is created by the sedentary, the state, with an interest in blocking the speed of flows, movements of elements not rooted in a supposedly homogenous whole. Many refugee children acquire by birth the legal status of being under temporary protection, a liminal position which for many turns into a life-long arrangement. How do refugee women and children re-create community and culture as bounded to a place? What kind of space delivers itself to being transformed into a place of belonging for them? To work through these questions, interview data from several Syrian women and three Syrian children gathered through semi-structured interviews are embedded in the observations of social workers and psychologists working at the Kizilay community Centre the informants frequent in the Bagcilar district of Istanbul Province in Turkey.