The Dyad of Care and Discipline: Aiding Syrian Migrants in Turkey and Germany
Hilal Alkan
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 contact 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 here 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 ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews with Syrian migrants who lived in Turkey become moving to Germany.
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