Do-it-yourself futures: experimental migrant solidarities in Turkey

This dissertation examines experimental solidarities with and among displaced people and their allies in Istanbul, Turkey, in the face of dynamic foreclosures of migrant belonging and futures. Based on twenty months of ethnographic research between June 2017 and March 2020 in both the peripheral (Esenyurt, Karagümrük, Bağcılar, Okmeydanı) and central districts (Beyoğlu, Şişli, Fatih) of Istanbul where majority of displaced people reside, I show how displaced people and their allies refuse top-down governance and categorization of refugees. I argue that these refusals generate experiments with solidarities to replace the existing hegemonic social relations and expand collective possibilities. In turn, experimental solidarities redistribute the originally unequally distributed hope among migrants and their allies. Whereas political oppression and migrant temporariness and precarity have been constantly reproduced in ways that permeate into the everyday lives and encounters of displaced people and allies, I show that experimental solidarities open interstices for alternative politics. The dissertation analyzes dispersed solidarity movements not based on resistance, but on experimenting – expanding what is available from within the cracks of the existing systems of oppression. Experimenting is about refusing the limitedness of mobilities and livelihoods of migrants and their allies, and replacing this limitedness with expanded, alternative politics and possibilities. When migrants and their allies teach about their succeeded experiments to one another, it creates a momentum of collective expansion of what is doable for these people, creating a dispersed but extensive movement. The dissertation builds on anthropological literature on solidarity and belonging, agency and refusal, and migrant futures, as well as the radical feminist insistence on the significance of refusal and everyday interstitial political actions for social change. In so doing, it demonstrates how refusing and experimenting do not only create oppositions to the existing hegemonic systems, but also organize alternative politics and futures. By focusing on experimenting with the alternatives of the refused hegemonic discourses and practices, it reveals modes of interstitial activism built upon the intersectionality of struggles for diverse groups of precarious migrants and their allies, beyond the ideology- and identity-based movements.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference