Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In post-earthquake Hatay, Turkey, the Alawite minority faces overlapping crises - COVID-19, the 2023 earthquake, the 2025 Alawite massacre, and economic collapse. Their connection to the region and sense of identity is suddenly questioned, revealing a world in which the future has become uncertain.

Paper long abstract

In post-earthquake Hatay, Turkey, young Alawites face overlapping crises - COVID-19, the 2023 earthquake, the 2025 Alawite massacre, and ongoing economic collapse. The earthquake flattened city of Antakya, prompting many to leave the region. Those who stayed were left to rebuild the city and mourn the many lives lost, yet economic precarity and cross-border violence suddenly forced Alawites to question their connection to the region and their sense of identity. Hatay, as the only place in Turkey with Alawite shrines, holds particular significance for the community.

Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2024-2025, I employ the concept of the “work of disaster” (Seale-Feldman 2020) to explore how social, ecological, and political disruptions are experienced and managed. The earthquake, delayed aid, and ongoing crises intensified vulnerabilities, particularly for minorities historically marginalized by state policies and social hierarchies. The 2025 massacre further destabilized these hierarchies and the region’s perceived security, which had already been undermined by the earthquake and the government’s slow response.

The paper emphasizes the phenomenological experience of living in a region that feels as if it is ending, illustrating processes of un-worlding and re-worlding as familiar social, spatial, and temporal structures are destabilized and partially remade. I conceptualize these experiences through dispossession of the future, a condition in which loss extends beyond material destruction to include uncertainty about intimacy, mobility, safety, and life trajectories. The Alawite minority, with nowhere else to go, struggles to forge new social and emotional worlds in the aftermath of disaster and violence.