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My name is Miriam Geerse and I am a Ph.D student at the Department of Cultural
Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. I have almost completed a
field study with Kurdish IDPs living in four municipalities on the Asian side
of Istanbul. I have tried to gain insight in the social consequences of the
internal displacement experienced by the Kurdish respondents. I focused on the
ways in which internally displaced Kurds reconstructed their social lives in
the urban setting, and on the relative importance of family- and neighborhood
ties, workcontacts, and regional, political and religious affiliations in this
social reconstruction.
Request to researchers on closely related topics:
As I have the impression that the location these migrants settled into has
been quite important in determining (the relative lack of) new forms of social
and political organization, I would specifically like to get in touch with
researchers who are also working on the topic of forcibly displaced Kurds in
Turkish settings. The migrants I studied were for the most part left to their
own devices: they live in neighborhoods that have been largely untouched by
NGO-activity for a long time, and it seems that at least initially there was
no organization or institution that could have played a leading role in
organizing people to improve their living conditions. I would like to get in
touch with researchers to discuss these kinds of issues, and compare my
findings with evidence about forcibly migrated Kurds in different Turkish
settings.
I would also be very interested to hear about (recent) civil society
initiatives in Istanbul - especially in neighborhoods like Sultanbeyli, Kartal
and Pendik - that include forced migrants in their projects (I am familiar
with the BASAK foundation, Goc-Der, TOSAV, TOHAV, TESEV and of course DEHAP).
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