Doctoral Dissertation Research: Unsettling Geopolitics: The Mobilization of Politicized Kurdish Identity in Two Refugee Communities

难民社区由一群人组成，他们通过共同的背景和共同的经历组成社区。以前对难民社区的研究往往侧重于国际政治层面，特别强调难民来自哪些国家，有时还侧重于难民寻求庇护的地方。这种以国家为中心的强调掩盖了与难民在新地点改革其社区的社会进程有关的重要问题和问题。这一博士论文研究项目将研究自我认同的库尔德难民如何克服社会、文化和历史差异，参与更大的库尔德认同运动。库尔德人身份认同运动的地缘政治影响涉及土耳其、伊朗、伊拉克和叙利亚内部和之间的当前冲突，以及它们与西方国家的关系。该项目的重点是难民动员政治化的库尔德人身份的过程。从难民研究、人类学和地理学的概念发展，将使用生命过程方法论来解释难民如何在社区内联系他们的经历。定性和定量方法将提供关于难民个人和难民社区如何尽管有散居国外的力量，形成和滋养政治化身份的信息。田纳西州纳什维尔和英国伦敦的两个库尔德难民社区的比较案例研究将采用深入访谈和调查的研究方案。使用这些方法收集的数据的分析将有助于解释社区如何克服成员之间的分歧以动员政治化的身份，以及它们如何将散居国外的库尔德人身份与国际政治联系起来并将其映射到国际政治中。这项研究将为库尔德问题的更广泛研究提供新的经验信息。通过对生命历程模型和难民作为政治行为者的研究，这项研究还将有助于难民研究的理论和概念工作，以及政治地理学和重要的地缘政治。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立研究生涯。

Refugee communities consist of groups of individuals who form communities through their common backgrounds and shared experiences. Previous research on refugee communities has tended to focus on international political dimensions, with special emphasis given to the states from which refugees have emanated and sometimes to the locales where they have sought refuge. This state-centric emphasis has obscured important problems and issues associated with the social processes through which refugees reform their communities in new locales. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine how self-identified Kurdish refugees overcome social, cultural, and historical differences and participate in a larger Kurdish-identity movement. The geopolitical implications of the Kurdish-identity movement concern current conflicts within and among Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria as well as their relations with western states. This project focuses on the processes through which refugees have mobilized a politicized Kurdish identity. Developing concepts from refugee studies, anthropology, and geography, a life-course methodology will be used to explain how refugees relate their experiences within communities. Qualitative and quantitative methods will provide information about how both individual refugees and the refugee community form and nourish a politicized identity despite diasporic forces. A comparative case study of two Kurdish refugee communities in Nashville, Tennessee, and London, England, will employ a research protocol of in-depth interviews and surveys. Analyses of the data collected using these methods will help explain how communities overcome differences among members to mobilize a politicized identity and how they relate and map a diasporic Kurdish identity onto international politics. This research will contribute new empirical information to broader research on Kurdish issues. Through its examination of the life-course model and refugees as political actors, this research will also contribute to theoretical and conceptual work in refugee studies, as well as political geography and critical geopolitics. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.