Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on "Anywhere on this Road", an auto-ethnographic film, highlighting the lives of 6 Kurdish intellectual women and their struggle against the male-dominated and colonised socio-cultural spheres in Europe and Turkish Kurdistan through an Oxford academic woman, a Kurd herself.

Paper long abstract:

Kurds, the fourth largest ethnic group in Middle East and one of the indigenous people of Mesopotamian plains in what are now south-eastern Turkey, north-eastern Syria, northern Iraq, north-western Iran and south-western Armenia, have never obtained permanent nation-state which makes them the biggest stateless nation in the world. They have long been suppressed and denied basic rights in their respective countries. As a result of labor migration, political turmoil, and conflicts in four Kurdish regions in Middle East, many Kurds have become dispersed throughout Europe and beyond. By going beyond stereotypical portrayals of Kurdish women either reflected as a victim of honour-based violence or someone who suffers war or violent conflict in any Kurdish region, this paper, through the auto-ethnographic film ‘Anywhere on the Road’ will be challenging these stereotyping images of Middle Eastern women and put forth strong and competent migrant women images.The paper will address to the objectives and the production of the film, dominated by road and journey images (referring to the migration and mobility of these women) both in Europe and Turkish Kurdistan, which is reflected through the eyes of Oxford university scholar Özlem Belçim Galip, a migrant woman herself in the UK, who travels back to her hometown (Şırnak, South East of Turkey) shows the destruction and war in her home country having led to these women to migrate to Europe.