Browsing by Author "Rottmann, Susan Beth"

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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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At the unsettling limits of collaborative life writing: A memoir of an ethnography-memoir
(Taylor & Francis, 2023-01-01) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
This chapter uses a memoir to examine the limits of anthropological collaboration. I draw on 12 years of friendship and fieldwork that culminated in my writing an ethnographic life story of a German-Turkish return migrant (Leyla) and publishing it together with Leyla’s own original memoir. In recent years, anthropologists have rightly celebrated collaboration as the latest incarnation of engaged, public or activist anthropology. Yet, while reflecting on my collaborative project with Leyla and moving forward with further ones, I have found that collaboration is limited in ways that have not yet been fully explored. Researchers have tended to focus on barriers to collaboration stemming from unequal power dynamics, appropriation of an other’s story and the revealing of ethnographic secrets. In this chapter, I argue that important challenges for collaboration lie with the ethics of reciprocity in the ethnographic encounter and specifically with issues of authority, readership and publication goals; the limited training of anthropologists to engage in co-authorship; and the highly fraught nature of friendship itself under the pressures of late capitalism and professional academic anthropology.
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Beyond legal status: Exploring dimensions of belonging among forced migrants in Istanbul and Vienna
(Cogitatio Press, 2020-03-25) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
Migrants with precarious legal statuses experience significant structural exclusion from their host nations but may still feel partial belonging. This article explores two dimensions potentially relevant for this group’s sense of belonging: city-level opportunity structures and public political discourses. Specifically, we examine perceptions of belonging among forced migrants with similarly precarious legal statuses located in Istanbul and Vienna. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, we argue that opportunity structures in the cities provide a minimal sense of social normalness within a period of life otherwise considered anomalous or exceptional. Any articulations of belonging in this context however remain inherently tied to the conditions of legal limbo at the national level. With regard to public political discourses, migrants display a strong awareness of the role of religion within national debates on culture and integration. In a context where religion is discussed as a mediator of belonging, we found explicit affirmations of such discourses, whereas in a context where religion is discussed as a marker of difference, we found implicit compliance, despite feelings of alienation. Overall, this article shows the importance of differentiating belonging, and of cross-regional comparisons for highlighting the diverse roles of cities and public political discourses in facilitating integration.
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Citizenship ethics: German-Turkish return migrants, belonging, and justice
(Sage, 2018-08-01) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
This article examines citizenship for German-Turkish return migrants attending monthly meetings of the Rückkehrer Stammtisch (Returner’s Meetings) in Istanbul. Meeting attendees call themselves “world citizens” and remain deeply concerned about disrespect and inequality they experience as ethnic minorities in Germany and as citizens in Turkey. Drawing on the anthropology of ethics, this research demonstrates the importance of ethical relationships for understanding these migrants’ experience of citizenship. Moving beyond work that views citizenship primarily in terms of state power and legal disciplining, this research demonstrates that citizenship for these migrants is focused heavily on an ethics of care and responsibility developed in the course of personal interactions with fellow citizens. This article also adds ethnographic specificity to the concepts of belonging and justice. It analyzes how ethical relationships established among meeting attendees confer feelings of comfort, intimacy, and a sense of shared humanity that structure migrants’ inclusion in national spaces.
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Conclusion
(Springer, 2023) Şahin-Mencütek, Z.; Gökalp-Aras, N. E.; Kaya, A.; Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
The findings of this in-depth case study provide insights for generalisations about how strategic temporality may operate in other refugee-hosting countries as well as specific findings about state responses to mass migration situations. Some key findings can be summarised as including a (1) complicated and fragmented legal system, (2) multiplicity of actors, (3) re-nationalisation and restrictiveness, (4) increased complexity and uncertainty in all layers of rules and practices, (5) consistent liminality experienced by refugees. These characteristics are observable in concrete policy practices in diverse sub-policy fields involving remote border controls, blocking reception, downgrading protection and slowing integration. As we showed, the concept of strategic temporality, along with its related components of liminality, uncertainty and complexity, is helpful for understanding state responses across time and sub-policy fields.
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Cultivating and contesting order: 'European Turks' and negotiations of neighbourliness at 'home'
(Berghahn, 2013-12) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
This article examines how Turks returning from Germany to Turkey self-fashion as 'orderly neighbours'. By maintaining aesthetically pleasing homes and gardens, keeping public spaces clean, and obeying rules and laws in public, return migrants believe they act as modern 'European-Turks' and exemplify good neighbourliness. Many neighbours, however, feel these actions are unnecessary or even disruptive to Turkish communities. In conversation with the burgeoning anthropology of ethics, this research explores how local, national and transnational assemblages foster reflections and debates on neighbourly ethics. Further, this study highlights anxieties about individualism, reciprocity, 'modernity' and 'European-ness' in today's Turkey.
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Cultivating membership abroad: Analyzing German pre-integration courses for Turkish marriage migrants
(Taylor & Francis, 2022) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
Addressing research on migration governance, this article examines German pre-integration courses offered to Turkish marriage migrants in Istanbul. The courses were implemented in response to growing concern about the perceived poor integration of Muslim migrants and a high number of forced marriages. I argue that these courses are a micro form of biopolitical governance. Specifically, they are an attempt to generate internalized ways of being and knowing that are desired by the state, which I call 'membership cultivation.' As such, the courses are not precisely aimed at restricting migration as in other pre-integration measures, nor are they mainly reinforcing symbolic boundaries and teaching liberalism as in post-migration German civic integration courses. Rather, the courses attempt to re-make migrants with regards to morality, culture and gender. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews, this research examines the disciplinary mechanisms targeting migrants' transformation to enhance our understanding of the biopolitics of pre-integration governance.
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Embracing vulnerability in writing migrant lives
(Taylor & Francis, 2022) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Sayer, R.; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
In this paper, an anthropologist and a life writer examine the implications of an ethical and political practice of vulnerability with regards to writing migrant lives. Drawing on research with migrants in Turkey and Australia, we argue that it is useful to use vulnerable methodologies, vulnerable relationships and vulnerable writing.
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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.”
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Forced migration and the politics of belonging: Integration policy, national debates and migrant strategies
(Sage, 2023) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
This research note examines the politics of refugee belonging in Germany, Sweden, Austria, United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Specifically, it explores how migrant belonging is impacted by integration policies and national political debates on immigration in these countries. Prior research suggests that refugees have little knowledge of policy, but that national political or media debates strongly impact a feeling of inclusion. Our research shows that both policy and national/media debates affect belonging. Despite widely differing legal and national contexts, the countries studied largely base integration on principles of cultural assimilation that can be hostile to “outsiders” and lead to insecure and contradictory belonging. The article also examines the strategies migrants adopt to forge belonging, depending on the national context. We find that in some contexts, migrants emphasize that they take individual responsibility for integrating and in others they build belonging on cultural and religious similarities with the host community. Thus, this research shows that the national policy environment not only impacts belonging, but also shapes the strategies migrants adopt to achieve it. The research is based on a long-term study conducted as a part of an EU Horizon 2020 project, RESPOND.
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In pursuit of belonging: Forging an ethical life in european-turkish spaces
(Berghahn Books, 2019-01-01) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
Belonging is a not a state that we achieve, but a struggle that we wage. The struggle for belonging is more difficult if one is returning to a homeland after many years abroad. In Pursuit of Belonging is an ethnography of Turkish migrants’ struggle for understanding, intimacy and appreciation when they return from Germany to their Turkish homeland. Drawing on an established tradition of life story writing in anthropology, Rottmann conveys the struggle to forge an ethical life by relating the experiences of a second-generation German-Turkish woman named Leyla.
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Integration
(Springer, 2023) Şahin-Mencütek, Z.; Gökalp-Aras, N. E.; Kaya, A.; Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
Strategic temporality permeates the integration experience of Turkey’s Syrians in a number of ways. First, given their temporary legal status, there is a grey area between reception and integration, which is highly symbolic of ambiguous inclusion (Kaya & Nagel, 2021). Until recently, there has been no publicly announced national integration policy; instead, there was only a discourse about uyum (social harmony) that is not premised on permanent inclusion or equal rights with locals. Further, refugees face liminality in every possible sphere governing long-term settlement, such as in the labour market, education, housing, health and citizenship. Most work informally and experience economic precarity; a third of Syrian children are not in school; refugees must secure their own (often substandard) housing; linguistic and other barriers prevent full health care access, and pathways to citizenship or long-term permanent residence are limited. All of this creates feelings of profound anxiety and uncertainty for refugees as they go about their day-to-day lives.
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Introduction
(Springer, 2023) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
Just after the local elections in 2019, irregular migrants in Istanbul faced a months-long crackdown. The Ministry of Interior from the Justice and Development Party government (known as AK Party or AKP) gave Syrians until 20 August 2019 to return to the cities in which they were first registered. Although the time period was eventually extended, the internal controls for migrants became stricter. Migrants found themselves frequently stopped by police, and officers visited registration addresses to check if they were occupied. If irregularities were discovered, the official directive was that Syrians should be returned to the cities in which they were first registered. For non-Syrian migrants without registration, the result of police stops was often being confined to pre-detention centres. According to the Head of the Directorate General Management of Migration (DGMM) of the time, Abdullah Ayaz, “Operations in Istanbul target irregular migrants such as Afghans and Pakistanis. Even if Syrians are found without registration at all, they are not deported, unlike the claims in the media. It is not possible to issue deportation decisions legally about Syrians due to the conditions in Syria” (AA 2019).
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Language learning through an intersectional lens: Gender, migrant status, and gain in symbolic capital for Syrian refugee women in Turkey
(Walter de Gruyter) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Nimer, M.; Humanities and Social Sciences; Piller, I.; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
This paper sheds light on Syrian refugee women’s negotiation strategies in language learning classrooms and in their broader social contexts from an intersectional perspective. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups complemented by participatory observation in language classes, we use a post-structuralist approach to examine gendered language socialization. Our research combines an intersectional framework and a Bourdieusian perspective on symbolic capital to show how women perform gender and negotiate their roles in classrooms, within families and vis-à-vis the host society. The findings demonstrate that being a woman and a migrant presents particular challenges in learning language. At the same time, learning language allows for the re-negotiation of gender relations and power dynamics. We find that gender structures women’s access to linguistic resources and interactional opportunities as they perform language under social pressure to conform to prescribed roles as mothers, wives and virtuous, and shy women. Yet, these roles are not static: gender roles are also reconstituted in the process of language learning and gaining symbolic capital.
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Legislative, institutional and political context
(Springer, 2023) Şahin-Mencütek, Z.; Gökalp-Aras, N. E.; Kaya, A.; Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
Refugee governance has legislative, institutional, political, and discursive dimensions. These components co-constitute each other and reflect the fragments of strategic temporality as a building principal. It is possible to trace signs of strategic temporality in each dimension. This chapter starts with an overview of the legislative landscape marked by the Turkish asylum regime’s dual structure. Then, it maps the institutional architecture where relevant actors put these legislations into implementation. Both legislation and institutions play out in a highly political domestic and international context, which is scrutinised in the following section. The discursive dimension will be delved into further in Chap. 3.
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(Lived) Spaces of belonging, culture, and gender: Spatial practices of home for Syrian women in Istanbul
(Sage, 2022) Sezginalp Özçetin, Pınar; Rottmann, Susan Beth; Interior Architecture and Environmental Design; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth; SEZGİNALP, Pinar Özçetin
Combining architectural and cultural anthropological approaches, this study explores the domestic lived spaces of Syrian women in Istanbul to understand how they create belonging in a new social and architectural setting and perform gender roles. We analyze data gathered from several types of dwellings according to the concept of spatial practice of Henri Lefebvre to explore how women’s daily life praxis fosters feelings of contentment and safety, and how they reflect on their previous homes in Syria through a lens of nostalgia. At the same time, we explore how houses in Syria are remembered via reflections on spatial changes. Methodologically, we rely on semi-structured interviews and mental map drawings of houses in Istanbul and reminisced houses from Syria. Ultimately, this research provides a fine-grained portrait of the (lived) space of Syrian women, showing how they reconstruct domestic lives through past/Syrian and current/Turkish spatial practices.
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Logistification and hyper-precarity at the intersection of migration and pandemic governance: Refugees in the Turkish labour market
(Oxford University Press, 2022-03-23) Nimer, M.; Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
This article analyses the governance of migration and the Covid-19 pandemic on precarious Syrian refugees in Istanbul. Drawing from a review of state policies and interviews with refugees before and after the pandemic, we argue that the intersecting governance of migration and the pandemic compounded inequalities. While refugees initially lost their employment without notice in lockdown periods, their partial lifting revealed unequal expectations towards their labour, as they were reincorporated within even more hyper-precarious labour relations. Unlike citizens who were somewhat protected by the state, refugees were under the limited care of international funders and subject to the whims of the market. Pandemic governance resulted in increased hyper-precarity and the need to rely on individual coping mechanisms for refugees. This research shows how shifting inclusion and exclusion shapes refugees' hyper-precarity related to Covid-19 governance, transforming Syrians into 'market buffers' to prevent or delay bankruptcies.
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Migration regime and “language part of work”: Experiences of Syrian refugees as surplus population in the Turkish labor market
(Sage, 2020-10) Nimer, M.; Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
The literature on migration, language and employment is dominated by the human capital approach and promotes multilingualism as a universal good. This paper examines the relationship between language and work for migrants illustrating how they are ascribed value as capital according to their position and the "language part of work." First, we trace a genealogy of the migration regime in relation to the labor and linguistic market of migrants in Turkey, characterized by informality and exploitation. Then, we look at the experiences of refugees qualitatively to show how language is differentially valued and has modest effects on social mobility. We argue that language learning instead of stemming from individuals' possession of capital should be examined within a broader linguistic and employment framework. This research goes beyond conventional wisdom about the centrality of language as a means to improve employment by shedding light on the structure that shapes language value.
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Protection
(Springer, 2023) Şahin-Mencütek, Z.; Gökalp-Aras, N. E.; Kaya, A.; Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
Turkey has a highly complex structure with stratified legal statuses and multiple actors in migration and refugee governance. The chapter shows how temporality is the key encompassing characteristic of Turkey’s refugee governance, which is the basis for its response to Syrian mass migration and multilevel refugee governance. In this regard, the chapter asks how strategic temporality is used as a tool for international protection in Turkey and what the consequences are in terms of the legal, political and institutional frameworks at the macro level, as well as perceptions, experiences, and strategies of policy implementers and policy beneficiaries at both meso and micro levels.
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Reception
(Springer, 2023) Şahin-Mencütek, Z.; Gökalp-Aras, N. E.; Kaya, A.; Rottmann, Susan Beth; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
In this Chapter, we describe the strategic temporality embedded in the Turkish reception system for Syrian refugees. First, we focus on the effect of laws and how they lead to nuances in multilevel governance on the ground where a local turn is observable, and a politics of subsidiarity is created. We discuss the discursive dimension of reception governance, which centres on cultural intimacy and guesthood rhetorics. These narratives reflect the strategic approach of policymakers who consistently underline that migrants’ reception is a temporal phenomenon. The chapter provides a multi-layered emphasis on discourses and practices that show how the reception is a policy field where strategic temporality is a dominant mode.