Managing Uncertain Times in Turkey: Refugee Healthcare Research during a Global Pandemic

Abstract

When I entered graduate school in September 2016, Turkey was mired in a series of successive crises. I had spent the first half of the year living in Istanbul, writing about the country's reception of Syrian refugees as a journalist and researcher. During that stretch, a series of suicide bombings and, in my last week in the country, an attempted coup, were formative for the way I made sense of future fieldwork in Turkey. I surmised that it would be wrought with unpredictability. My research interest in Syrian refugees’ access to Turkey's state services was itself marked by uncertainty. This uncertainty was tied to the nature of Syrians’ explicitly temporary legal status within Turkey and the broader domestic and geopolitical context that shaped the contours of Turkey's refugee policy. Given these layers of unpredictability both endogenous and exogenous to my research interest, I planned to design my research with uncertainty as an analytical focus.