Everyday interactions between local and refugee women in a Turkish town :|identity construction and negotiation

Abstract

This doctoral project investigates the dynamics of everyday interaction between refugee and local women residing in a mid-size Turkish city. Focusing on social gatherings of local and Iraqi Turkmen refugee women in domestic spaces for one year, the linguistic ethnographic study undertaken in this project explores the dialogical processes through which these women construct and negotiate their stances and identity positions. Regular field observations were supplemented by a total of 70-hour of audio-recordings of spontaneous interactions in Turkish in informal social gatherings, interviews, and home visits. Findings reveal how these interactions were observed to be normative and stance-saturated, and the hegemonic nationalist, religious and patriarchal discourses were all-pervasive. They also show that while the Iraqi Turkmen women’s efforts to capitalise on the shared identities resulted in the emergence of “brief moments of tight but temporary and ephemeral groupness” (Blommaert, 2017, p. 35), in the long run, their refugee identity overshadowed other identities which they claimed for themselves.