Home as a concept of belonging(s): Narratives of Three Generations of Kurdish Women in Diaspora(s)

This research aims to explore the social construction of sense of home, belonging(s) and identities of three generations of Kurdish-Alevi women who live in diaspora(s), in Germany and in Greece where a comparative ‘research in the research’ has been conducted in two different refugee camps. “Research in the research” is used to explain a sub-research conducted in two refugee camps in Greece which host Kurdish refugees from different parts of Kurdistan. The topic of this research, home as a concept of belonging(s), has been analyzed from a perspective of ‘sense of place’ and community link for this sub-research on the refugee camps. For the data collection of this sub-research, biographical interviews with nine Kurdish women and participant observation have been used as methods. This “research in the research” is reported in the fourth chapter in this thesis. Meanwhile the main body of this research, which has been conducted in Germany, used diaspora and three generational approach in order to reveal the relationships between ‘self’, ‘structure’ and ‘social change. The concepts of sense of home, belonging(s) and identities are very useful to demonstrate social changes because these concepts connect individual and social, as Simmel (1964) and Elias (2001) claim that individual and social dimension cannot be separated. Diaspora and a gendered perspective of generational approach gave possibility to demonstrate the transformation of Kurdish-Alevi families and transmission of sense of home, belonging(s) and identity claims from one generation to another through time and space dimension. What especially marks the novelty of this analysis is that the investigation enlarges the generation perspective with the incorporation of a third generation and explores the intergenerational communications of imaginations, attributed meanings, representations as a crucial factor in the formation of identities. The ‘home’ concept in this thesis, departing from the literature produced by feminist scholars, is intended as a metaphor which is not home in the material sense but multiple ideas of ‘home’ as broad multifaceted and multilevel concept in terms of sense of belonging and “home is within and beyond the house” (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). This research analyzes the sense of home from a framework of diasporas created by guest workers, refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers and collocates itself in the category of studies on the sense of home and belonging(s) in diaspora while the concept of home, sense of belonging(s) and identities are considered dynamic and in a continuously-changing-process. May (2011) defines belonging as a sense of ease with oneself and one’s surroundings. Miller proposes that belonging is ‘the quintessential mode of being human [...] in which all aspects of the self, as human, are perfectly integrated – a mode of being in which we are as we ought to be: fully ourselves’ (2003: 218 quoted in May, 2011:368). In this research, belonging is considered as an important aspect of being a person: it is “fundamental to who and what we are” (Miller, 2003: 217 quoted in May, 2011:368). Belonging involves a process of constructing a sense of identification with one’s social, relational and material surroundings (Miller, 2003), or ‘of recognising – or misrecognising – the self in the other’ (Leach, 2002: 287). The concepts of home, belonging(s) and identities by their socially constructed “nature” of being dynamic and in constant change (Armbruster, 2002; May, 2011; Yuval-Davis, 2006) have been reconciliated with the specific methods and methodologies. The narratives around home were conceptualized as situated narratives of multiple belonging and identities using the feminist standpoint theory (Collins, 1986; Harding, 1991, 1993; Haraway, 2004; hooks, 1984) with an intersectional approach (Collins, 1986; Crenshaw, 1991; Carastathis, 2016; Collins&Sirma, 2008; Yuval-Davis, 2006). In this sense, for the harmony and coherence between the research topic and methodology, the methods of biographic interviews precisely “biographical identity-biographical structuring” (Fischer-Rosenthal, 2000:114) and “action research-problem centered interview” (Witzel, 2000) have been used. Biographical approach has been considered as more than just an interview method, since narratives on belonging(s) and identities which are constituted within, not outside representation, arise from the “narrativization of the self” (Hall 1996:4). Furthermore, as an extension of the harmony and coherence discourse between the research subject, the field, the methods and the methodologies “the outsider within” (Collins, 1986) approach and the reflexivity of researcher (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1994 [1991]; Bourdieu, 2000) have been used by the researcher with a brief auto-biographical note in order to show a coherent engagement with what has been argued in the theoretical part of the research. To conclude, in this thesis, I tried to understand and show: What are the concepts of home, belonging(s), identities, identity and coalitional politics? ; How are these concepts (re)constructed and effected by multiple migration experiences of agents?; What is the role played by cultural, socio-political and historical elements on home, sense of belonging(s), and identities?; Which meanings are attributed to these concepts by women and how these attributed concepts and meanings are transmitted from one generation to other? I aimed to show these relationships between the self and the social from a perspective explained by the transmission of sense of home, belonging(s) and identities using gendered, three generational and diasporic approach as a tool to reveal their mutual change through a space and time dimension with a particular attention on the “identity narratives” (Fortier, 2000); “identity politics” (Yuval-Davis, 2006) and “coalitional politics” (Crenshaw, 1991; Carastathis, 2016) of Alevi and Kurdish diasporas in Germany and their reflection in the narratives of the interviewed women.