Learning to be Freed. Deep Encounters with the Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Youth in Turkey

Asylum-seeking youth often voyage emotionally through the many wounds they receive along their migration journeys. Having to endure the horrors of war and violence, they are often haunted by the
memories of neglected, traumatic childhoods. This dissertation is based on PhD fieldwork between 2015 and 2016 in Istanbul Turkey and is co-created together with youth from Afghanistan, Somalia,
Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran and Syria residing at a state care shelter for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers. Among them, Abdi Deeq becomes the interlocutor, translator and the co-ethnographer, as we conducted youth participatory action research that involved radio shows, photography and audiovisual workshops. The life stories shared during the radio shows revealed hidden aspects of the youth’s emotional and intellectual worlds, providing them with various strategies for survival. Inspired by the pedagogies of Freire and Spivak, our gatherings provoked the emergence of what Bhabha calls to be the third space, that is illustrated through in depth life stories. While a mixed group of youth attending high school were informing the post-colonial theory, a younger generation of Syrians revealed their current circumstances—being subjected to fatal human rights abuses, sharing escape stories from the hands of extremist groups, moving from imprisonment and detention to refugee camps. As often as our conversations dealt with the feelings of loss, trauma, insecurity and guilt, our time together also spared place for hope, resilience, dreams and further aspirations. Borrowing Bhabha’s lens of what he calls to be a displaced angle of vision, we looked carefully into the interstitial spaces of the beyond and in between of meaning, knowing, being and becoming. Thus, the many new metaphors produced during the workshops in photographic images and in their elicitations voiced a deep encounter and recognition into their legacies of pain, suffering and triumph in ways that transformed present reality and representation as the youth searched and learnt to be freed.