RE-MEMBERING GERMANY AT HOME: TRANSNATIONALIZATION OF RETURN MIGRANTS THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHS AND LIFE STORIES

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2023-3-31

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Evren, Irmak

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Turkish migration to Germany that started in the early 1960s was essentially a response to a call concerning demand for labour on a temporary basis. By the time economic crisis hit and followed by a further recruitment ban,an act in 1983 was officially introduced as a return incentive to mainly unemployed migrants in Germany. Since the myth of return eventually turns into a reality, Turkish migrant workers return rather than being a rupture in the migratory cycle, becomes a continuation of migration, endowed with transnationality which emphasizes on the individual links that returnees forge with host country that stretch to their post return lives. In this regard, questioning returnees ties with hostland, this study focuses on the mnemonic links of eleven first and second generation Turkish return migrants from Germany to understand the role of host country in their present setting. As traveling memories, narration of a past reproduces their ties with the country left behind through incorporating its memory image in homeland, constructing usable pasts that allow for their translation into practices, mentality, ideas that inhabit present setting, while shaping their sense of belonging to both home and hostland selectively. In addition, as vehicles of memory, family photo albums of returnees would be used since they are dynamic in sense of interpreting past, most commonly expressed through articulation of the past, comparison between there and here, negotiation incorporating past into present, unravelling what they represent in returnees imaginary. Therefore, this study mainly draws upon life story interviews with a thematic on hostland and photo elicitation method to understand the memory work of the returnees that unfolds their multiple relations with Germany.

Subject Keywords

Transnationalism, Return Migration, Memory, Photography, Life Story

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/102773

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

I. Evren, “RE-MEMBERING GERMANY AT HOME: TRANSNATIONALIZATION OF RETURN MIGRANTS THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHS AND LIFE STORIES,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2023.