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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research across Istanbul’s Little Syria neighborhoods, this paper argues that improvised practices of “ordinary care” enable Syrian refugees to build stable and dignified lives despite living in legal and economic precarity in the aftermath of war and displacement.

Paper long abstract

The majority of the 2.5 million Syrian nationals residing in Turkey are classified under the ambiguous legal category of “Temporary Protection” even after fifteen years. While this status provides Syrians with legal residence and a set of basic rights including free healthcare at public hospitals and access to education, it doesn’t give them the right to shelter or formal employment, making livelihood difficult in an expensive metropolis like Istanbul. Given this context of care deficit, my paper examines the everyday lives of working-class refugees and argues that “ordinary care” is a crucial means by which they build sustainable and dignified lives despite living in legal and economic precarity in the aftermath of displacement. Ordinary care, as I theorize here, is an improvised form of life-making which includes practices of reciprocity and neighborliness, as well as the ethical relations and affective ties that are forged in the process. Compared to organized political protests by which refugees make the news, ordinary care is more subtle and easily overlooked because it unfolds in the intimacy of domestic, everyday spaces such as the family homes, the neighborhood, and local organizations. It is informal, improvised, and tacit in contrast to top-down forms of governmental and humanitarian care provided to refugees. Based on long-term ethnographic research in the “Little Syria” neighborhoods of Istanbul, my paper reveals the concrete ways in which ordinary care—as resource, relations, and affect—is given and received as Syrian refugees strive to create stable lives despite growing anti-refugee sentiment across Turkey.