Browsing by Subject "Syrian refugee women"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Open Access
Confronting gendered constructions of refugee deservingness and representations: Syrian refugee women strategising for humanitarian aid in Turkey
(Routledge, 2022-12-12) Zadhy, Aminath Nisha; Erman, Tahire
This study shows how Syrian refugee women living in Ankara cope with their systematically enforced dependency on humanitarian aid through individual and collective agency as they negotiate their inclusion into categories of deservingness and attempt to maintain this inclusion. We argue that the gendered discourses used to delineate deservingness categories in the humanitarian field clash heavily with the portrayal of Syrian refugees in Turkish public discourse. Our qualitative data demonstrate how notions in the humanitarian field about women’s role in the family as nurturing homemakers, assumptions about their innate docility as vulnerable refugees and the contrasting portrayals in Turkish society of Syrian refugee women as sexualised threats to the Turkish family shape their agentive negotiations and subsequently lead to multiple tensions. We also highlight how the centrality of gender in the discursive framing of refugees in Turkey produces the idealised refugee in the figure of the widowed refugee mother. By problematising how refugee women’s agency play out, we intervene in the discussion about the gendered terrains of refugeehood and provide empirical weight for the exploration of the paradoxes in the humanitarian field that refugee women struggle to resolve.
Open Access
Gendered social imaginaries in the Turkish humanitarian field: the strategies of Syrian refugee women to reach aid
(2022-12) Zadhy, Aminath Nisha
This dissertation investigates how Syrian refugee women in Ankara cope with their systematically enforced dependency on humanitarian aid. It uses gendered social imaginary as the theoretical framework. With the initial premise that refugeehood is a gendered experience where gender is a logic of organising humanitarian aid, it demonstrates how actors in the humanitarian field deploy gendered templates at both organisational and interpersonal levels. Paying particular attention to the interactions between humanitarian aid workers and refugee women sheds light on how gendered social imaginaries are drawn from templates emerging from discursive constructions that delineate deservingness categories in the humanitarian field. While female vulnerability predominantly associated with refugee women is a vital template guiding humanitarian enactments, the study exposes how refugee women have to simultaneously contend with contrasting gendered templates that act as barriers to their access to aid, leading them to rationalise specific behaviour in response and deploy specific strategies as they attempt to conform to the role of the ideal humanitarian subject. In the field study, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 refugee women and aid workers were conducted, complemented by participant observation in multiple sites in Ankara where Syrian refugees are concentrated. The data from the field study further illustrated the significance of humanitarian aid practices along the formal-informal axis when examined at three levels – the national, the district and the neighbourhood.
Open Access
Reflexive reciprocity under an ethics of care: Reflections from the field for refugee studies
(Oxford University Press, 2023-12-12) Zadhy-Çepoğlu, Aminath Nisha
By bringing reflexivity and reciprocity into conceptual dialogue in a discussion about the ethical framework of care in research, this article discusses how ‘reflexive reciprocity’ can be a research tool in migration studies. Taking reciprocity—the dynamics of giving and receiving—as an aspect contextually bound to the refugee experience, I propose that a relationship of giving and receiving helps undermine the inevitable power asymmetries in knowledge production. Reciprocity becomes all the more essential when researching refugee communities where narratives are prompted in a way that mirrors how refugees are elicited to give information within mechanisms of refugee governance, where they narrate their neediness, perform their vulnerability, and justify their deservingness in return for legal and humanitarian protection in traumatic processes that can be a distortion of the norms of reciprocity. This article invites researchers to address reciprocity in research, premised on the idea that an ethical framework of care should go beyond paying lip service to protect vulnerable and marginalized participants. Reflecting on my case study research with Syrian refugee women in Turkey, Ankara, I argue that reflexive reciprocity is both a tool for more rigorous data collection in a qualitative inquiry and a practical application of an ethical framework of care. In exploring instances where I could link reflexivity to actionoriented reciprocity through ‘everyday acts of caring’, I demonstrate that reflexive reciprocity can somewhat balance out the extractive nature of research and thereby contribute to the ongoing discussion about the ‘reflexive turn’ in migration studies.
Open Access
Spaces of in/formality in the Turkish humanitarian field: Spatial and discursive practices impacting refugee women
(Sage Publications Ltd., 2024-11) Erman, Tahire; Zadhy-Çepoğlu, Aminath Nisha
Drawing upon critical feminist theorising, this article intervenes in the debates about humanitarian aid organisations in the case of urban refugees to highlight the ubiquity of in/formal practices in their interlinkedness that increasingly shape aid distribution. By examining humanitarian enactments at three levels –the national, the district and the neighbourhood– in the case of Ankara, Turkey, the article advances theoretical discussions about how formality and informality are intertwined as spatial techniques and discursive practices are deployed justifying in/formality in practice. We argue that such spatial and discursive interventions have become normalised as local aid distributors seek legitimacy in a contested process to counteract their image as unregulated. By centring the experiences of urban refugee women and their engagement with in/formal humanitarian practices, we expose the gendered connotations underpinning these interventions at the three levels of humanitarian enactments as (1) detached paternalism at the national level creating refugee women’s alienation, (2) a culture of Islamic charity at the district level prompting gendered performances of victimhood and (3) patriarchal ideology of male saviours linked to Islam at the neighbourhood level disciplining refugee women and leading to their (sexual) exploitation. In doing so, we problematise spatial and discursive modalities of in/formality, which produce profoundly gendered precarities, causing refugee women’s subordination in multiple ways. Bringing attention to how in/formality− as a part of contemporary conditions of refugeehood− interacts with gender, and how legitimacy is attained through on-the-ground spatial techniques coupled with discourses, we contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the humanitarian field.