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Abstract
This article presents a reflexive ethnographic analysis of ‘refugee lives’ and borders and boundary-making in the Turkish borderlands. Since 2011, the humanitarian crisis as a result of the Syrian civil war, and the arrival at the European border zones of refugees crossing the Mediterranean, have occupied the news outlets of the world. Today the European Union and Turkey look for permanent ‘solutions’ and emphasize ‘integration’ as a durable response to forced migration. This essay explores reflexive dimensions of long-term-fieldwork with Syrian refugees at the Turkey-Syria border through an analysis of ethnographic encounters and the politics of belonging and place-making. Borders are often contested spaces that complicate the researcher’s positionality, which oscillates between a politically engaged subject position and the ‘stranger’ who encounters the ‘other’ and must negotiate her space. By examining the Turkish-Syrian border and Syrian refugees’ experiences in the border city of Antakya, this article offers a critical lens to view the identity and politics of the researcher and embodied geopolitics.
Highlights
This article presents a reflexive ethnographic analysis of ‘refugee lives’ and borders and boundary-making in the Turkish borderlands
Key-words: Reflexivity, Hatay, Syrian border, Ethnography, Displacement In November 2020, while I was conducting my fieldwork on Syrian women’s healing processes in Hatay, the southernmost border of Turkey with Syria, I was invited to a book club organized for women by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) – an international non-governmental organization operating in Turkey – to participate in the reading and discussion of a book with Syrian refugee women
Ethnographers need to be conscious of how research and its written result have potential repercussions for various communities, which in my case includes both borderlanders and the Syrian refugees
Summary
This article presents a reflexive ethnographic analysis of ‘refugee lives’ and borders and boundary-making in the Turkish borderlands. As a border ethnographer with multiple subject positionalities, I needed to be aware of the different sentiments of ethno-religious groups I had worked with in Hatay.
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