| dc.description.abstract | Despite being the second largest ethnic group in Syria, constituting around 10-15% of the total
population, and the target of state machinery since the mid-1930s, Syrian Kurds’ everyday lives
and experiences have largely been omitted from academic discourses. This thesis aims to
represent their voices in the scholarly literature by analysing their everyday lives to
conceptualise the entanglement between their sense of self, Kurdish identity, and everyday
experiences.
The ‘everyday life’ was used as a framework to collect data from Syrian Kurds who live as
refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (through semi-structured interviews conducted in 2018
and 2019). The participants' narratives, serving as the primary source, were pivotal in shaping
and adapting the theoretical frameworks used in this thesis. Four significant themes emerged
from the data: the integral relationship between the sense of self and social relations; the
cathectic relationship that participants disclosed towards praxes identified as Kurdish;
communal agency and collective orientation in Kurdish society; and the sense of disorientation
that they experienced due to the securitisation of Kurdish identity in Syria. These themes were
analysed using theoretical frameworks and concepts in psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology,
anthropology, and political science. These frameworks were aligned with the empirical data to
conceptualise the abovementioned themes.
The data analysis demonstrated a profound entanglement between the sense of self, social
relations, communal life, and collective identity. It further illustrated the psychic life of Kurdish
identity under the repression of the monist Arab regime in Syria. Participants' narratives, as
represented by lengthy quotations throughout the thesis, carried their voices into the academic
literature, exemplified and elaborated the discussed themes, contributed to the theoretical
frameworks used, and provided a basis for further research in the field. The theoretical
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discussions unveiled a nuanced and intertwined sense of self with everyday life, wherein the
self simultaneously experiences and interacts with the power dynamics at micro, meso, and
macro levels | en_GB |
