CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Achik, Sara |
|---|---|
| Title | Incorporating silence and haunting memories to autoethnography and oral history: reconstructing a journey as bicultural daughters out of Syria |
| Summary | The aim of this research is to examine the concepts of silence and haunting memories as unspoken and often inaccessible dimensions of migratory experiences, using mainly memories of my sister and myself when leaving Syria (my father’s country) with our (Mexican) mother in 2009. This research engages with feminist debates on experience discussed by authors such as Joan Scott (1991), Sangster (1994), and Canning (1994), adding a cultural studies and psychoanalytical perspective on racial melancholia as articulated by Eng and Han (2000). Furthermore, this study addresses the methodological and theoretical challenges of working with personal experience, particularly from the perspective of bicultural daughters like my sister and me. It emphasizes the ambivalent and contradictory dimensions of identity and belonging, offering a more nuanced understanding of migrant experiences. In this context, experience will not be used as evidence per se, but to analyze how it is shaped by but also negotiated within broader discourses on borders and identities that are commonly assumed as fixed and coherent. Unlike the focus on migration experiences from a home country to a foreign one, commonly from south to north, this study seeks to address borders and identity, and migrants’ experiences through a cross-cultural lens and from a south-to south approach, where belonging and the relationship with geographical and symbolic borders is ambivalent and hardly fits into constructed discursive dichotomies or opposites. |
| Supervisor | Professor Nadia Jones-Gailani |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/achik_sara.pdf |
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