Transnational Agency or Economic Empowerment? Experiences of Kyrgyz Domestic Workers in Turkey

2022-8-26
Gaipova, Arailym
The thesis investigates the conditions shaping the possibilities and limitations of the transnational agency of Kyrgyz domestic workers in Turkey. Transnational agency, following the relational framework, is understood as a capacity of an actor to unify different social worlds by transposing different schemas and resources from one world to another and developing temporal orientations encompassing various interactions across these worlds. The objective is to show how social worlds are connected and how this connection is embodied in relations transcending national boundaries and transforming according to the experiences of Kyrgyz women during migration and employment as live-in domestic workers in Turkey. By using semi-structured in-depth interviews with 17 Kyrgyz domestic workers in Ankara as a primary source of data, three social worlds of Kyrgyz women are delineated: family and kinship relations in Kyrgyzstan, migrant networks developed during labor migration in the post-Soviet space and Turkey, and employment relations in the reproductive labor market in Ankara. Consequently, the study demonstrates how past, present, and future are connected in the minds and practices of Kyrgyz domestic workers, who thereby link social worlds by schematizing the past interactions to solve the present problems and build plans for the future in accordance to present experiences. Nevertheless, the findings shed light on how the agency is contingent on political, economic, and cultural structures in Kyrgyzstan and Turkey. As a result, the study concludes that Kyrgyz women become economically empowered through labor migration and employment as domestic workers in Turkey while still acting within the structural constraints.

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Citation Formats
A. Gaipova, “Transnational Agency or Economic Empowerment? Experiences of Kyrgyz Domestic Workers in Turkey,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.