Einstein Gastwissenschaftlerin – Senior Fellowship: ?zlem Savas

Forscherinnengruppe ?Migration, Flucht und Diaspora“

Forschungsvorhaben:
This research explores diasporic solidarity and affective politics that emerge and operate from intimate digital places of new migrants from Turkey. Due to recent increase in political repression and turmoil in Turkey, a growing number of people – mostly intellectuals, academics, journalists, artists and students – are leaving the country and settling around the globe, especially in Germany. New migrants from Turkey have created various digital media platforms and online groups to provide solidarity, collaboration and collectivity. These digital media sites serve as places of intimacy, affinity and affective politics, as they are imbued with collective, public and political feelings that emerge from common experiences of particular social, political and historical circumstances and that are registered as the basis of existing and possible collectivities.
The role of affective digital media environments in achieving solidarity, collectivity and transformative politics has been largely neglected in the growing scholarship on significant uses of digital media by migrants. This research firstly aims to explore the role of digital media in shaping and reshaping intimacy and affinity among migrants who hold common experiences. Secondly, it aims to explore new political horizons and subjectivities brought about by affective and affinity-based diasporic politics that play through intimate digital places and expand across other spaces. This research employs engaged and collaborative ethnographic methodology to generate particular and critical scholarly knowledge from within, and accessible and transformative knowledge that potentially contributes to migrant networks of our age.