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Diasporic Counterpublics: Iranian Asylum Seekers in Turkey
Abstract by Dr. Navid Fozi On Session 133  (Turkish-Iranian Encounters)

On Saturday, November 19 at 8:00 am

2016 Annual Meeting

Abstract
This project draws on my fieldwork in different Turkish cities with substantial number of Iranian asylum seekers. These transit migrants who voluntarily pursue a permanent resettlement in a third country are composed of religious minorities and new converts including Christians, Baha’is and Zoroastrians, LGBTQ, as well as political dissidents and ethnic groups. Exploring issues including transit processes and the right of asylum; homeland, host country and international politics and policies; transnational practices; as well as membership criteria and identity development, my analytical framework builds on two theoretical/conceptual interventions that address (con)-temporariness of the diverse migrants in a globalized context. First, accounting for the religious, gender, and ethnopolitical multiplicities schematizing the Iranian migratory terrain, I problematize the analytical utility of 'asylum' and 'refugee' as homogenizing legal and political categories. While others have addressed this shortcoming, a theoretical solution has not yet been advanced. My second intervention is to approach the transitory period between seeking and receiving asylum as a phase in the formation of the global Iranian diasporas. Accordingly, drawing on the literature on transit migrants, I recast diaspora concept in order to analyze a mostly voluntary resettlement in a formative cultural continuum rather than an abrupt expulsion of a monolithic collectivity. Avoiding dichotomous models of geography/genealogy and homeland/host country, I employ a processual and imaginary concept of diaspora in order to articulate the place of the third country in the development of the diasporic subjectivity, which entails national and legal loyalties, as well as emotional ties. Exploring diasporization of marginality as processes shaped by and shaping a globalized condition for invisible Iranian counterpublics to expand into visible diasporic ones, I would also be able to analyze identity productions across cultural, geographical and political boundaries.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Diaspora/Refugee Studies