by Luisa Lupo

This past May 31st, we gathered at the Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University Hotel, in the town of Akyaka, Turkey, for a study day focused on gender and forced displacement (see the agenda). This event was part of the Gendering Survival from the Margins project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The main goal was to present research findings from the project and build a network of academics and practitioners committed to research and action on forced displacement, with a shared dedication to gender equality and social justice.

We kicked off the day by presenting the first output of the project, Displaced lives, a paper by Raksha Gopal and me (currently under review), that examines the practices of survival performed by Rohingya and Syrian refugees as they confront a continuum of violence resulting from their forced displacement in India and Turkey, respectively. We show that for people living in conditions of prolonged displacement, social reproduction, that is, the activities and relations that sustain life, such as cooking and taking care of dependents, becomes a matter of survival that entails re-producing security and a home. Thus, practices of care and social reproduction also produce physical and ontological security. They highlight the role of the security state, and not just of the welfare state, for social reproduction. By juxtaposing two different contexts and diverse realities of Rohingya and Syrian refugees, we underscore the need to overcome methodological nationalism in studies of forced displacement and its related insecurities, without reproducing a category, that of the nation-state, too often coercive and violent in the lives of refugees.

The second paper is Gendered Circuits of Violence, a collaborative piece coauthored by Elisabeth Prügl, Raksha Gopal and me. It is a review of over fifty decades of feminist studies across feminist political economy and feminist security, in the form of an encounter of literatures on social reproduction and violence. Our main argument is that there is violence in the denial of social reproduction and that the practice of social reproduction itself can be violent, particularly for women and marginalized social groups. Despite this, practices of social reproduction and care have a liminal quality that gestures toward different futures beyond violence.

These findings prompted us to examine three interrelated themes during our study day: 

1. how refugees, migrants and other forcibly displaced persons negotiate with forced displacement in their everyday;
2. how social reproduction and mobilities are structured by experiences of labor within globalized neoliberal markets, particularly at the bottom of agricultural supply chains; and 
3. how we, as scholars and researchers, practice research ethics, deal with issues of translation, and make our research impactful with practitioners and activists. 

We asked our participants to engage with these questions over the course of two panels and one roundtable respectively and here is what they had to say.

Saadet Altay and Jessie Clark pointed to the creation of sacred spaces by working-class Kurdish women in the aftermath of displacement in southeast Turkey, as a form of negotiation of not only their relationship with the supranatural, but also material hardships, masculinist systems of power, and the state’s neglect (i). While displacement and resettlement meant a shrinking of women’s daily geographies in a city where public space if often men’s prerogative and Kurdish people face marginalization, Kurdish women’s spiritual practices had a transformative potential, allowing them to carve out a space for themselves and their community. Private communal prayer houses and public tomb sites used for communal petitions thus became sites of politics where, in Saadet and Jessie’s words, women could “organize and lead collective and embodied meditations and petitions that centre their desires, concerns, and wishes.”

While Saadet and Jessie focused on geographies and the ways in which space gets transformed by Kurdish women’s religious practices, Özge Biner and Zerrin Özlem Biner examined temporalities and the transformations engendered by Syrian refugees’ waiting practices (ii). Living in the present through the activity and practice of waiting, they argued, is an important facet of Syrian refugees’ lives in Turkey, where they live in a permanent state of uncertainty regarding both their legal status in the country and the possibility to return to Syria. Practices of social reproduction can help refugees repair the ongoing violences that they face, but survival also entails moments of suspension, during which Syrian refugees, as Özge and Özlem demonstrate, “replace waiting for fulfilment of the material demands of their Turkish present with the patience of fashioning a way of life that keeps their future expectation of a return to Syria alive.” Waiting and practicing patience thus represent ways of inhabiting and understanding the world.

Starting from Syrian refugee women’s everyday practices of cooking and parenting, Susan Beth Rottmann (with Maria Kanal) prompted us to rethink the meaning of agency and the role played by cultural contexts in mediating gender roles (iii). She asked, can letting go or giving up also be forms of agency? Whose wellbeing is the goal of social reproduction and to what effects? While the answers to these questions are not clear cut, as their study argued, agency does not have to be a ‘big’ action; it inhabits domestic routines, attempts to create new happy memories for oneself and one’s children, and being patient with economic hardship.

Practices that sustain life, such as the activities necessary to care for children, and maintain households and communities are an important parts of people’s everyday lives, particularly in contexts of displacement and dispossession. While being crucial for people’s survival, these activities simultaneously contribute to capital accumulation and are undermined. Turkey’s migrant farm work regime is a key example of this, as suggested by Saniye Dedeoğlu (iv) (in a forthcoming paper coauthored with me).  Seasonal migrant farm work, largely performed by Syrian refugees and disenfranchised ethnic groups in the country, is precarious not just because it lacks predictability and job security but also because it is a gendered, racialized and exploitative labour regime that allows to reduce the costs of reproduction of labour for employers and the state with detrimental effects on farmworkers’ lives. It is sustained by informalized, state‐sanctioned labour contracting practices and the ‘workification’ of farmworkers’ households, as farmworkers need to bring their own household possessions and resources to settle and survive in make-shift homes within camps that lack access to basic services, such as water and electricity, and without adequate compensation.

Neoliberal transformation and agrarian change, such as the establishment of greenhouses, undermine social reproduction in rural areas, particularly for small-scale peasant households subjected to increasing dispossession from their lands and loss of commons, but they also marked a shift in gender and generational divisions of labour, and newfound prestige for women. As discussed by Zeynep Ceren Eren Benlisoy (v), the state’s services in the form of access to welfare is a crucial part of social reproduction and a determinant of women’s choices. Because of it, women from rural areas are determined to leave their livelihoods as small-scale farmers and become workers in the greenhouse, despite instances of mobbing, intrusive performance systems, insufficient access to drinking water, and high workplace temperatures.

Returning to seasonal migrant farm work, Deniz Pelek presented the heightened vulnerabilities resulting from climate disasters and how these intensified struggles for social reproduction in a forthcoming paper on the gendered effects of flashfloods and the 2023 earthquake in southeast Turkey (with Cemil Yildizcan) (vi). Natural disasters and environmental vulnerability exacerbated the economic and health vulnerabilities of farmworkers, with women and children increasingly compensating for economic losses through their labor and playing a crucial role in the recovery in the aftermath of flashfloods. Although the earthquake led to increasing labor shortages, these did not translate into improvements in wage levels as macroeconomic assumptions would predict. Instead, they aggravated exploitation, particularly women’s and children’s, by extending working hours and intensifying workloads.

Taken together, these studies highlighted the importance of prioritizing women’s perspectives and experiences to better understand the ways in which forced displacement is a violent process, structured by both the exclusionary rules of the state system and of globalized neoliberal markets. Nevertheless, there are important ethical and methodological issues that need to be considered when doing research with marginalized communities. With this in mind, we discussed research ethics, issues of translation, and how to make academic research impactful with Nurgül Certel, Özgur Cetinkaya, and Nurcan Talay, who shared four key learnings for both research and practice. (vii)

Creating an appropriate interview environment can be challenging but this is important data in itself. Drawing on her experience as both a social worker and an academic doing research on polygamous marriages among Turkish men, Turkish women and Syrian refugee women, Nurgül shared the difficulties associated with accessing such households and ensuring an environment where Syrian women could share their stories. The women she interviewed would often get interrupted and were not afforded the same privacy as men. As she argued, these routine interruptions tell us something about gender hierarchies and power relations. They also pointed to the fact that what cannot be expressed is as important as what can be.

Although we might feel compelled to intervene in certain situations, it is important to consider our capacity to do so without inadvertently causing more harm. Intervening in cases of child labour, forced labour, domestic violence, or underage marriages, for example, carries its own risks, presenting significant dilemmas for researchers and practitioners. Reporting cases of forced labour, child labour and domestic violence might be difficult to prove and thus hard to act upon. Reporting these abuses would require notifying the gendarmerie, which may not provide direct assistance to the child or family and could create dangerous situations for the victim, as well as for researchers and practitioners themselves. While there is a legal obligation to report underage marriage, doing so can also be perilous, as authorities’ response is often inadequate and limited to taking people into custody. Since researchers face constraints in following up and ensuring safety for the research participants after the research ends—our roundtable participants agreed—it is crucial that they collaborate with social workers and other specialized organizations that can offer ongoing support by helping families and monitoring at-risk individuals.

Translation is an important part of doing research with marginalized communities, involving both linguistic interpretation and the translation of research findings into actionable policies. While some scholars might view working with interpreters as a limitation, this is not necessarily the case, as interpreters can bridge cultural gaps and encourage openness among interviewees. When it comes to accessing research participants and disseminating research findings, however, collaboration between academics and practitioners is not exempt from tensions, for example, between academic freedom and the constraints imposed by organizational and donors’ interests. Our panelists stressed the necessity for research to be concise and actionable, and for researchers to report back their findings to research participants, while making their work relevant to practitioners by including case studies.

Both Özgur and Nurcan recognized that, as researchers and practitioners, we might feel a sense of powerlessness and frustration when our work seems to exploit the vulnerabilities experienced by marginalized communities without being able to ensure tangible improvements. In spite of this, they reminded us that positive transformations take many forms. While macro-level change may be slow and elusive, particularly when it comes to influencing legislative change, Özgur says, micro-level changes can and do happen. It is important to recognize and value these micro-level advancements; while it is easy to feel discouraged, small and incremental improvements can lead to meaningful change. One example is the creation of child- and women-friendly spaces that Nurcan has supported to create with IPUD and the Red Cross in Şanlıurfa, providing relief to farm workers and their children through mobile facilities in the cotton fields.

From the transformative spiritual practices of Kurdish women in southeast Turkey to the decisions of Syrian refugee women embedded in the ordinary acts of waiting and performing domestic activities, and the precarity of migrant farm work, our discussions underscored the significance of social reproduction and care in contexts of prolonged displacement and marginalization. Our conversations also highlighted the ethical dilemmas and challenges in conducting research with vulnerable populations. By centering the lived experiences of those at the margins and emphasizing the necessity of actionable research grounded in specific contexts, we reaffirmed our commitment to foster a deeper understanding of everyday gendered survival practices in transnational spaces, questioning entrenched assumptions and envisaging other possibilities.