Affective Culture of Post-Gezi Migration from Turkey: Collective Emotions, Traveling Stories and Relationalities

Amid escalating political oppression in Turkey, a growing number of dissident academics, artists, journalists, and students, as well as others seeking to escape political, social, and economic turbulence, left the country after the 2013 Gezi movement and resettled in Berlin, Germany. How does displacement feel? What role do emotions play in collective, public, and political spheres that both shape and are shaped by migration experiences? What kinds of experiences, creativities and relations come into focus when we view migration through the lens of emotions and affects? Guided by these questions, this engaged ethnographic research examines affective practices of mediating the lived experiences of post-Gezi displacement across media, artistic projects and public events. Identifying an affective cultural sphere that composes a profound emotional repertoire of displacement, it explores how affective practices shape subjectivities, relationalities, and political horizons through the emotions they manifest, create, circulate, and archive.

Related publications:

• Savaş, Ö (forthcoming) “Rupture and Reparation in Audiovisual Narratives of Displacement” in Audiovisual Healing and Reparation: Recuperative Affect of Mediation. Eds. Özgür Çiçek and Özlem Savaş. London: Routledge.
•  Savaş, Ö (2022) “Rakı Table Conversations of New Migration from Turkey: Emotion, Intimacy and Politics,” in Material Culture and Forced Migration: Materializing the Transient. Eds. F. Yi-Neumann , A. Lauser, A. Fuhse and P. J. Bräunlein. London: UCL Press. pp. 171 -191.
• Savaş, Ö (2019) “Affective Digital Media of New Migration from Turkey: Feelings, Affinities, and Politics,” International Journal of Communication 13, pp. 5405-26.