Rebuilding Honourable Lives

: Syrian Female Refugee Workers And the Making of Post-war Selves

Abstract

This thesis explores the subject formation of Syrian women who had to rebuild their lives after fleeing Syria and becoming refugees in Turkey. The study finds that most of them, before their exile, had occupied the honourable position of housewife but now have to find paid work to support their families. For many, the only employment available is domestic work. This feminist ethnographic study with Syrian refugee women in Istanbul asks: how do female refugees rebuild a sense of self through paid work after fleeing Syria, and what form of the self is constituted through performing that work? Using the works of feminist poststructuralist anthropologist Saba Mahmood and philosopher Judith Butler, I illustrate how these women desire to rebuild the honourable selves they had been before their exile, but the only work available, domestic work, is doubly stigmatised and threatens re-establishment of that honourable self. However, Syrian women find multiple ways of performing domestic work while protecting their honourable status. In this thesis, I explore the reconstitution of the honourable self through (1) strategies of silence – invisibility, concealment, renaming, and refusal to speak; (2) strategies of recognition – redefining the work as ‘halal work’ and identifying as a ‘sister worker’; and (3) strategies of attachment, which involve establishing sisterly attachments with employers who identify as ‘sister employers’. In introducing a theory of the constitution of the Muslim female refugee labouring self, this study makes three contributions: (i) in developing the theory of the performative constitution of Muslim honourable female refugee labouring self, this study brings new insights to poststructuralist literature on subject formation; (ii) it contributes to emerging area of refugee studies in MOS by expanding the sparse literature on the rebuilding of selves after the extreme trauma of war and exile; (iii) it contributes to the limited work on the organisational lives of Muslim women. In foregrounding experiences of Muslim female refugee workers in non-Western contexts, I contribute to epistemic bridging and the decolonisation of knowledge in MOS.

Date of Award	23 Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Nancy Harding (Supervisor) & Deborah Brewis (Supervisor)