Senior Lecturer in Anthropology
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
& School of Anthropology, Media and Gender
Archives of Solidarity: Precarity, Creativity and Shared Future-making Across Closed Borders
This project explores how refugees and citizens in Turkey and the UK create spaces of mutual support, care, and creativity in the face of restrictive border regimes.
Overview
Archives of Solidarity: Precarity, Creativity and Shared Future-making Across Closed Borders is a major research project led by Dr. Zerrin Özlem Biner, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS and Director of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies (CMDS). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the project brings together an international team of scholars, artists, and activists to investigate how solidarity between refugees and citizens emerges and flourishes in conditions of precarity.
The project examines encounters in Turkey and the UK—two societies positioned at different ends of the EU border regime, yet both deeply shaped by it. While the UK has progressively tightened asylum regulations, culminating in the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act, Turkey has become home to the world’s largest refugee population, while also facing mounting political and social pressures to send refugees back. Despite these challenging contexts, citizens and refugees have generated rich forms of mutual care, resistance, and community-making.
Central to the project is the creation of a multi-modal digital archive that documents these solidarity practices. Drawing on oral history, ethnography, literature, and audio-visual media, the archive will preserve and share knowledge generated across borders and communities.
A key component of the project is its series of participatory workshops. These are open, collaborative spaces where youth, refugees, citizens, and activists come together to reflect and experiment with new forms of collective practice. Workshop participants engage in oral history interviews, creative writing, and filmmaking, producing materials that will be part of the archive. In doing so, the workshops not only document solidarity but also enact it—building networks of care, creativity, and shared struggle.
By connecting experiences across the Global North and South, Archives of Solidarity seeks to foster new conversations on how we imagine, practice, and sustain solidarity in a world of closed borders.
Image Credit
Hande Cayir
