Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10679/5962

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Browsing by Author "Kanal, M."

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    Akle Tayyibe [Tasty Dish]—Cooking up belonging in the Syrian refugee foodscape in Turkey
    (Taylor & Francis, 2023) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Kanal, M.; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
    This article is a study of Syrian women’s food practices in Turkey. Researchers have shown that food matters for belonging, but we need more research examining how migrants use food in memory-work; how they cook to create a “happy home”; and how shared meals are tied to inclusion in communities. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this research examines five food practices of belonging that can inform migration researchers about how refugees relate to their heritage and collective memories. The article sheds light women’s agency within struggles over belonging and the role of food in the home-making processes of refugee families.
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    Everyday agency: Rethinking refugee women’s agency in specific cultural contexts
    (Frontiers Media, 2021-11-17) Kanal, M.; Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
    This article proposes an interdisciplinary approach to refugee agency – the capacity to act within structural conditions – using the example of Syrian women rebuilding family and home in Turkey. Our broader objective is to prompt a re-thinking of refugee women’s everyday agency for scholars researching migration. The dominant manner of studying agency tends to be centered on refugees’ efforts to change their particular situations. Drawing on the latest theoretical propositions of cultural psychology (collective coping and the cultural coping model), we argue that agency can also be observed through examining how refugees rebuild their lives in the face of the many changes and challenges they have experienced. Guided by the cultural coping model, we describe stressors and coping strategies in context. With this approach, we can escape the trap of viewing refugee women in dichotomous ways, either as traumatized victims or as liberated from “traditional patriarchy.” A total of 33 semi-structured interviews were conducted in Turkey with Syrian, Arabic-speaking adult women. Interviews aimed to obtain comprehensive narratives on acculturation, daily stressors, coping strategies and everyday experiences of uprootedness. We used constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) to identify significant themes (initial coding) and then code for more conceptual units of meaning (focused coding). The findings are structured around context specific themes: stressors and coping strategies. The study revealed three important types of stressors: family-related, role-related and place-related stressors. Each stressor can only be understood within the cultural context of inter-dependent agency, motherhood and neighborhood belonging, which are highly valued lived experiences of the refugee women. The study also identified three coping strategies: faith-based, home-making and identity building strategies. Our research shows that relying on Islamic understandings, creating the routines of a happy home and forging neighborly ties are important gender and culture specific manifestations of agency. The value of this research is that it provides migration scholars a useful model for designing research with female refugees. By identifying and writing about these specific and contextual forms of agency, researchers can provide better support to refugee women in their daily lives, while also challenging the image of passive “womenandchildren.”