• Migration and exile with a focus on cultural production and everyday practices
• Media studies, digital culture and digital humanities
• Affects, emotional practices and collective feelings
• Material culture and visual culture
• Ethnographic and convivial research methodologies

Research project:

Affective culture of post-Gezi migration from Turkey: Collective feelings, traveling stories, and relationalities

Duration: 1.1.2022 - 31.12.2023

Since the 2013 Gezi movement, a growing number of people—mostly academics, artists, journalists, and students—have left Turkey due to escalating political oppression and settled around the globe, especially in Berlin, Germany. This ethnographic research focuses on affective culture of post-Gezi migration from Turkey that has been created through emotional practices across digital media spaces, artistic projects, and public events. It examines practices of telling, performing, reworking, and networking lived and felt experiences of political oppression, displacement, and relocation and investigates how they shape subjectivities, social spaces, and relationships. This research aims to explore how structures of feeling that these practices unfold, enact and circulate build collective memory, shared history, and intimacy among strangers. Furthermore, it aims to explore how these collective, public, and political feelings shape affinities and collaborations as well as differentiations and distancings both within and beyond the particular migration experience from which they arise.

Related publications:

·        Savaş, Ö (in press) “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.

·        Savaş, Ö (2019) “Affective Digital Media of New Migration from Turkey: Feelings, Affinities, and Politics,” International Journal of Communication 13, pp. 5405-26.