Contextualizing the global

I have created this project under Stanford University's EPIC Fellowship, which aims to empower community college faculty to globalize their curricula. Thus, my first goal in this project is to offer community college students in the U.S. information about a historical event, Circassian exile, which is a little known topic in the U.S. When we try to teach a global topic to community college students (and undergraduates in general), one steep hill we need to climb is to teach the topic in its proper socio-historical context, with all its complexity and nuances. For example, in the past, I have attempted to talk about "honor killings" in my Sociology of Family and Marriage course. I have studied violence against women in the Turkish context, so Turkey would be the national framework. First, I needed to talk about Turkey, its incomplete "modernization," and the disproportionate status of women in Turkey based on rural vs. urban, working class vs. middle class backgrounds. By the time I got to the topic of honor killings, a week had already passed setting up the cultural and political framework. Then, my students were so shocked and outraged by the subject matter, they had many emotions and questions, which was understandable but time-consuming to handle. It took me about three weeks total (in a 17-week course) to talk about this important but painful topic adequately. This was too much time in a course that was designed to be a survey of the American family through time. After a couple of semesters, I gave up. So, this is an attempt to talk about a difficult subject that happened a long time ago in a faraway place within its proper socio-historical context.

Digital History and Storytelling

I already knew that I wanted to make the topic come to life in a different way. I tremendously value and respect academic research, the peer-review process, and all the work that goes into a good academic piece of writing. However, while reading a published sociological paper may be a productive challenge for my community college students, it can also be stifling and alienating for them. It may reinforce the idea that college is not for them, they're just not college material. Many lack the familiarity with the sociological jargon and the peculiarities of academic writing. The content may be fascinating but the form in which it is presented is simply inaccessible for many laypeople. Therefore, I wanted to create a new way of presenting academic material that is more engaging, accessible, fun, interactive, visually interesting, and viscerally effective (and affective). As the next section discusses, often, academic writing hides the urgency of action that needs to be taken or the amount of emotion that is necessary to adequately engage with this topic. The research on online teaching and learning shows us that our students do better in online courses if they feel connected to the instructor and their peers, cared for, understood, and seen. Showing vulnerability and concern for our students can strengthen our teaching. Students also tend to retain information better if they feel connected to the material and have emotional reactions to it.

I have learned that "digital history" is an effective method of presenting academic material in an engaging way. I have also infused my personal story and my family's story into this project because this, once again, makes the story more relatable. Another strength of presenting research in this manner is that it's open to the public. So, not only is the language accessible and relatable, hopefully the whole content is too. This last feature opens up possibilities for collaboration with other researchers interested in the same topic, as well as students. In fact, I look forward to working with my students and encourage them to engage in similar projects, where they go deep into their family histories. There are so many stories and so many historical events they're connected to. I hope using Google Sites, a free, accessible platform will empower my students to do the work with no cost, just some time, love, effort, and enthusiasm.

In this project, I have tried to present the struggle and history of a people, Circassians, from a sociological perspective. I am not a historian, so archival research and primary sources were not accessible to me. In that sense, I call this project a digital history project reservedly. However, I have used my strengths and experience in doing academic research. I have written a doctoral dissertation and a book based on my doctoral work, so I'm familiar with the process. The subject matter itself, Circassians, is understudied, so research into this topic meant sifting through written materials and evaluating their academic rigor. The Circassian diaspora is active in Turkey (although still quite invisible in the mainstream public sphere) and produces fascinating materials, however, I was only interested in well-researched studies. The Circassian diaspora in Turkey is proud. I know I will not make everyone happy with this project. (For example, some may not like the Circassian Genocide to be mentioned in the same breath as the Armenian Genocide.) But I'd like to remind everyone that this is a study focusing on certain aspects of Circassian history and culture, and in that sense, it's limited. I was also limited by the challenges of accessing materials during a pandemic, which I will further discuss below. I just hope I was able to provide enough context to place Circassian Exile in its proper socio-historical context, and discuss migration broadly.

Feeling the feelings: studying forced migration

The affective engagement vs. academic objectivity

I have previously academically studied violence against women. Back then, "feeling the feels" did not seem appropriate. As I sat in a dark room in the Sunset district of San Francisco (a neighborhood known for its thick fog) in the winter of 2006, transcribing narrations of the violence women have endured in their lives in their own voices, I began to feel the feels come over me. My way to avoid feeling the pain was to take action. I went through a 40-hour training to become a domestic violence counselor, which I've completed within a week at 8 hours per day for 5 consecutive weekdays. The training was grueling due its hours but also, due to its subject matter. We had highly-skilled instructors who asked us at the end of each day what we would do for self-care that evening, to avoid burnout. I remember finding the question ludicrous initially. In my mind, what was talked about that day didn't affect me emotionally. During the next decade or so, as I volunteered at a local agency supporting services to victims of domestic violence (DV), Woman Inc., continued to study and teach DV, and wrote a book about it, I approached the subject as such: as something that happened to other people, a topic I was studying.

As I now study topics of forced migration, displacement, and exile, I find myself in a different emotional state. First, I feel deep down the pain of leaving one's place of origin, even though I'm not displaced. I chose to emigrate from Turkey to the United States to study. I chose to stay in the U.S. for love. But I still feel the trauma of separation.

Secondly, I am now a mother, so I think I allow myself to feel more deeply in general. Becoming a mother changed my scholarship and gave me permission to consider affect as an academic endeavor in and of itself. Becoming a parent challenges me every day, strains my relationship to my partner. While my trauma is dwarfed by what many others have gone through, the trauma of surviving COVID-19 has inflicted me as well. I now have a much more visceral personal relationship to trauma.

To me, the acknowledgment of affect in social sciences or what can be called the "affective turn" is the permission to move away from cold stone objectivity in our methodologies and the acknowledgement of emotion- what we feel when we study these painful subjects- but also, what our readers or students may feel when they're exposed it with their own personal trauma informing their psychological state.

I teach painful subjects, subjects my students have visceral personal reactions to: poverty, racism, migration, DV... Over my many years of teaching (14 years and counting), I was asked how I deal with burnout from teaching such painful subjects. I think my defense mechanism was to hide behind academic objectivity. Now I see the violence in removing ourselves from our objects of study, how numbing that is, and moreover, how that removes the sense of urgency these subjects often require.

Thus, this project is an attempt to personalize the historical and in the process, make it more accessible but also enhance its emotional impact and urgency. If we are going to teach or learn about trauma, which forced migration inevitably entails, I argue we need to allow ourselves to feel the feels. Otherwise, our subjects remain as some others bad things have happened to, rather than people with whom we share a deep common affective bond of being human in a deeply violent, racist, classist, sexist, unequal, power-hungry economic and political system. We need to feel their pain so we can become the social justice warriors (co-conspirators a la Bettina Love) we need to be. Because without pain, there is no outrage. And without outrage, there will be no change.

When I teach about the painful events of the past, my goal is not necessarily to inspire people to seek reparations for that particular pain or atrocity (although that is also a worthy goal). My goal is to build bridges so we can viscerally feel the pain of others who are currently going through a similar situation: those detained at the U.S.- Mexico border, for example. We need to build those bridges so we can understand the political and economic sources of their migration, build solidarities, and allyships to support them, and to make sure this kind of violence is never inflicted again, on anybody.

Oral history/ History from below

History is the study of past events. But as the old adage goes, "history is written by the victors," which points to the fact that we often only get one version of history and not the full extent of all events. Similarly, when historical research relies on official archives (as it often does), we only get the official point of the view or the point of view of those who have written up the official documents that end up in the archives. So, who and what ends up being heard: the commander's point-of-view in a battle and not of an individual soldier. We may have access of the official books of a trading company in the 19th century and learn about what they bought and sold, profit margins etc. but we would not hear the experiences of an individual worker. Sometimes, historians get lucky and get their hands on a diary written by a housewife in the Victorian era. Similarly, in immigration studies, it is rare to get the immigrant's point-of-view, although we may very well know the total numbers of migrants in a given place at a given time from official documents. My project was informed by the work of historian Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, who has uncovered letters written between Circassian brothers Fuat and Cevat Beys. Dr. Hamed-Troyansky was able to reconstruct their exile story through these letters, which allows him to gain access to their concerns, goals, resources, and many other details of their lives.

If we have access to people who have lived through the event we are interested in, we may conduct research utilizing oral history as a research method. Oral history is simply asking people to tell their own stories in their own words. I have embarked upon the current project with the hope that it would be an oral history project. I would initially ask my relatives what it was like to be Circassian in Turkey and try to uncover their family's history of exile. But then, COVID-19 happened, so travel to Turkey became impossible. I have conducted some interviews via Zoom. The possibility to easily record Zoom interviews definitely came in handy. But I could not use the snowball technique to expand the number of my interlocutors. This is the method of asking a respondent to refer you to someone else they know with similar characteristic. Using the snowball sampling method helps the researcher to build rapport with their interlocutors, as they come to them through a trusted person. My previous research in Turkey taught me that in the Turkish context particularly, where people may be distrustful of strangers who ask them questions, the snowball method works wonders. However, turns out, even with the snowball method, people do not like to be interviewed by strangers on Zoom. The human touch, the social connection that the researcher's physical presence brings, is still missing. Therefore, I have failed to conduct oral history research remotely.

Research during a pandemic: Technology and its shortcomings

Working on this project during a global pandemic was quite interesting, to say the least. On the one hand, this was the perfect opportunity to create a digital resource. Everything seemed to be available at my fingertips. However, there were limitations. The EPIC fellowship came with access to all Stanford libraries, alas, the libraries were closed. We could borrow digital resources remotely, but with limited access. It taught me that my process involves sitting in a physical library, pulling physical books and journals off the shelves, and browsing through them, to see what will or will not be useful. Without that, I worry this research remained somewhat shallow. I have included some questions for further inquiry in most sections. I hope to look deeper into these questions in the coming years. So, this website is also an outline for further research threads.

Blueprint for further, collaborative projects on migration

I envision this project as a blueprint for other migration projects. I hope my students are encouraged and empowered by the use of Google Sites as a free tool to create their own "Home Within" projects.

This project connected me with my ancestors. I had a chance to get the family lore straight, learn some dates and details, gather some family pictures. I have researched and tried to make sense of my great-grandfather's story. During this project, my mother had a cancer scare and I thought I would lose her. Many memories, dates, events, even photos disappeared with my grandmother (after her death and my aunt's move to a new home, photo album went missing, an album I used to browse through every time I would visit my grandmother as a young adult). I was worried more would disappear with my mother. I don't want that to happen to my students. I would like them to capture the family memories and commit them to writing while their grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents, in short, those who know the stories, are still alive. Over the years of my teaching, I've heard many immigration stories from my students ranging from ancestors on the Mayflower to my students crossing the Southern border personally. Those stories need to be captured. Then, those stories need to be contextualized and placed in their proper historical and socio-economic framework. In other words, it's interesting to uncover one's ancestors immigrated to the United States from Italy in 1920. But we need to know more to understand their sociological position. I have created the template below to help a student with Filipino parentage interview her parents. Perhaps it will be of some use. I look forward to hearing from the readers of this website, so we can create your own "Home Within" projects. My contact information is below.