Learning to Be Freed

Abstract

This paper delves into the life stories of three unaccompanied asylum seeking youth residing at a state care shelter in Istanbul in 2015 and 2016. Through its intervention, the research follows an engaged anthropological approach to reveal the hidden aspects of the youth's emotional and intellectual worlds. The in-depth life stories shared here illuminate Homi Bhabha's Third Space Theory (1994) and are amplified by a methodological approach we call affective multimodalities. As we seek to understand the various ways the youths navigate survival and learning to be freed from institutional categories, we explore a few concepts of Third Space Theory: extraterrestrial territories, paradoxical worlds, afterlife-rebirth, and a displaced angle of vision. Through the practice of a collaborative radio show and photography elicitations, the youth were asked to share their dreams as they were encouraged to realize their potentials. During this co-creative approach, one of the youth even became a co-author of this paper. The ethnographic insights produced through this approach allows us to explore the third space theory with a poetical reflection through words and images.