EUME
2016/ 2017

Hilal Alkan

The Dyad of Care and Discipline: Aiding Syrian Migrants in Turkey

Hilal Alkan received her PhD in Political Science from the Open University, UK and her MA in Sociology from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. In her dissertation, titled “Enchanted Welfare: Islamic Imaginary and Giving to Strangers in Turkey”, she focused on civic charitable initiatives in Turkey. Her research involved a ten-month ethnographic study of the local aid organizations of the Central Anatolian town of Kayseri. With the interdisciplinary lens of citizenship studies and economic anthropology, Alkan developed a framework that utilizes gift theory to analyze the daily encounters between different actors of charitable networks. She published some of her findings in the chapter “Ethics of Care, Politics of Solidarity: Islamic Charitable Organisations in Turkey” (in Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices, eds. T. Pierret, B. Dupret and P. Pinto, Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Alongside charitable giving and welfare provision, her research interests include gendered spatial formations (especially urban anthropology), women’s experiences of war, and care ethics. She has been teaching at a number of Turkish universities for the past four years. She is also a member of the Women’s Initiative for Peace, which works on gendering the peace process and documenting gendered rights violations during conflict in Turkey. In 2017, Hilal Alkan received the “Voltaire Prize for Tolerance, International Understanding and Respect for Differences”.

The Dyad of Care and Discipline: Aiding Syrian Migrants in Turkey

This research project focuses on the forms of contact between city dwelling Syrians in Turkey and Germany, and people who joined together in local initiatives to aid them in resettlement. The contacts between volunteers of these groups and their Syrian beneficiaries are sometimes only one-off, yet, others expand over time and turn into established relationships. The more developed a relationship is, the more prominent the aspects of care become. Drawing on the literature on ethics of care and focusing on the workings of power in such ethics, I argue that discipline is immanent to care. In other words, care relationships necessarily lead to the disciplining of both, the carers and the cared for. The core question is, which normative registers are articulated in the enactments of the care-discipline dyad: religious norms, nationalist aspirations, prevalent conceptions of gender, and/or capitalist work ethics? This project explores these questions through the engagement with extensive ethnographic data from the field.