Yasemin Ozer

YASEMIN OZER, then a graduate student at City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, New York, was awarded funding in April 2018 to aid research on “Syrians in a Turkish City: Improvising Care Beyond the Refugee Camp,” supervised by Dr. Karen Strassler. This ethnographic project investigates the emergent social relationships and care networks forged between Turkish citizens and Syrian nationals in the working-class neighborhoods of Istanbul that currently host the largest Syrian population in the country. Using participant observation and open-ended interviews, this research traces the ways historically and morally charged social categories such as “guest,” “neighbor,” and “Muslim kin” are deployed by Turkish nationals and Syrians to study the emergent social networks that link Syrians to each other and to Turkish citizens. It explores where and how care materializes in this context, and examine if a new kind of urban citizenship is being formulated in the process. By placing questions of care — ethical concerns over who matters, to whom, and why and how they matter — at the center analysis, the project moves beyond “the bare life/camp” paradigm and opens up a space for analyzing modes of relationality between citizens and refugees, solidarity networks formed between them, and new forms of social life flourishing at the peripheries of the city.