The researcher has conducted in-depth interviews with 20 Syrian Kurdish women, and one focus-group interview with fifteen women, who currently live in Norway and Sweden. She visited the women several or many times in their homes and, next to the interviews, also had many casual conversations with each of them. Additionally, she did participant observation by spending time with individual and groups of women, and by attending celebrations, home gatherings, concerts, political meetings, and demonstrations. The research was carried out between June 2017 and January 2019.
For the visual aspects of this study, the researcher collaborated with photojournalist Iffit Qureshi to examine women’s self-presentations. Qureshi portrayed Kurdish women’s lives in and around Oslo by attending gatherings and demonstrations, and by talking with the women about the ways they wanted to be photographed. This resulted in a unique image about Syrian Kurdish women’s life in exile.
The research was very successful and sheds light on many different aspects of the life experiences of the women under study:
1. The women gave much information about their personal and family histories. This makes it possible to understand their current narratives and life situations as part of that larger history. This led to an understanding of women’s lives, their experiences with war and persecution, and their migration to Europe, in the context of a longer history of marginalization of Kurds and women in Syria. One of IMEX’s main contributions is this long-term perspective in which the current situation of new migrants is not studied in isolation, but in connection to their life, family and community histories.
2. IMEX gives a new understanding of how women in conflict situations relate to the conflict, also if they are not actively involved themselves. Their perspective sheds light on how ‘ordinary’ people in a conflict region relate to that conflict on a day-to-day basis.
3. Since the beginning of the Syrian war, and especially after the emergence of the conflict with ISIS, Kurdish women came in the media spotlights because of their involvement in the conflict as guerrilla fighters. One of the objectives of this project was to better understand how Kurdish women feel about the depiction of Kurdish women in the media. It turned out that the majority of the women were on the one hand showing support for (female) guerrilla fighters, but were also highly critical about their recruitment and involvement in armed struggle.
4. IMEX contributes to a better understanding of the reasons for women to leave the country in situations of violence and conflict. An important conclusion is that women have gendered reasons to leave, which means that their motivations are often related to the fact that they are women. Women’s decisions for escape are complex and multiple, and women often had a certain level of agency and decision power about leaving the country.
5. IMEX also sheds light on the refugee journey women undertook before they arrived in Scandinavia. Although women did often leave together with men, there were also women who made the journey by themselves. Traveling as a woman, and traveling alone, has special challenges that women face. Women showed a variety of strategies to deal with these challenges.
6. The project looks into women’s relationship to place and mobility. It shows that women’s migration should be understood within a longer history of mobility before and during the war.
As a whole, IMEX contributes to new understanding about Syrian Kurdish life experiences, a topic that has been highly understudied.
