Thinking Beyond Victim and Perpetrator in the Sociology of the Exilic Intellectual: Conflict, Memory, and Wound

Abstract

How might researchers studying conflict and academic exile embrace Saidiya Hartman’s and Sertdemir Özdemir’s concerns about the role of pity and myth within the wider context of research on exilic scholars? How might researchers re-represent both conflict and exiled intellectuals without reproducing enmity in times of rising authoritarianism? And how might we conceptualize political implication in research on exilics, particularly in the face of war and conflict? We reflect on these questions through a conceptual engagement with a researcher’s involvement in studying academic exile and view this involvement as a form of critical intellectual positioning with the wider geopolitical contexts of Turkey and Syria.