Discursive Power of Scholarly Produced Knowledge About Syrian Refugeedom in Türkiye

Socially engineered and constructed meanings, concepts, ideas, and values related to Syrian refugeedom are nowadays produced and re-appropriated by numerous experts and scholars almost without regard to the detrimental effects on the lives of refugees and host societies. Their efforts to treat refugees as global citizens with human rights, while well-intentioned, do not provide workable solutions to the protracted lives of Syrians worldwide. To date, knowledge about the current situation of refugees has been informed by epistemological and policy frameworks developed to better understand and care for refugees. However, this knowledge of the conceptual and empirical space of refugeedom as a new mode of being today largely fulfills the bureaucratic and technocratic needs of Western liberal democracies that seek to control and discipline people on the move within their normative taxonomies of legal categorizations. Based on a critical qualitative sociological study of Turkish scholars/experts’ knowledge production about Syrian refugees on the Balkan route since the 2015/2016 European migration/refugee crisis, the aim of this chapter is to present a methodological innovation in research design and the study of contemporary migration issues within the sociology of migration. A balanced study of knowledge production and global refugeedom was conducted to bridge the epistemological, methodological, and empirical divergences between critical sociology/sociology of knowledge and migration studies. By applying an interdisciplinary qualitative analysis (constructivist grounded theory methodology combined with a Foucauldian discourse analysis), it was possible to determine how and what kind of scientific/expert knowledge was produced by Turkish scientists/experts and to what extent their research findings were in line with those of their international colleagues. This chapter will therefore conclude by revealing the unknown and unexpected findings about the discursive power of knowledge produced by scientists on the Syrian refugee issue and the subaltern potential of Turkish academia in order to produce new methodological results (sociology of knowledge discourse approach) that are open-ended and deal intensively with morality.

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