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ROTTMANN, Susan Beth

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Susan Beth

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 22
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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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    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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    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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    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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    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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    'We always open our doors for visitors' - Hospitality as homemaking strategy for refugee women in Istanbul
    (Oxford University Press, 2021-09) Rottmann, Susan Beth; Nimer, M.; Humanities and Social Sciences; ROTTMANN, Susan Beth
    This article examines social relations for Syrian women in Istanbul by focusing on micro-level lived relationships of hospitality. Through an ethnographic, qualitative approach to key sites of encounter, the article explores how migrants navigate a public milieu in which hospitality has partially been taken away from the local community's moral oversight in a context of a national political discourse on hospitality. We also analyze 'hosting' and 'guesting' as mutually negotiated and contested practices. This study highlights the agency and resistance strategies of Syrian women to their 'differential inclusion' into Turkish society. It examines how they navigate (in)hospitality and also unpacks the use of virtuous dimensions of hospitality (1) to reverse discriminatory ethnic and class discourses and renegotiate subjectivities that are imposed upon them as 'guests'; (2) to bring forward perceived cultural similarities between Syria and Turkey; and (3) to revalorize their roles and status in their families. The contribution of this study is to focus on hospitality as a means of theorizing how women navigate complex and conflicting, familiar and yet also new, social ecologies as they make themselves at home.
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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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    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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    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.