Begüm Ergün

What happens to our sense of home when the ground beneath us never stops shifting? If the physical body is our first true home, how do we survive when war, earthquakes, and displacement continually fracture it? How do people build a habitable world when catastrophe is not a passing event, but a constant condition?

My research argues that “home” is not the recovery of a stable place, but a daily, bodily struggle. Between 2022 and 2026, I spent twenty-four months conducting immersive ethnographic fieldwork in Sultanbeyli—a working-class district on Istanbul’s outer periphery characterized by deep urban poverty, failing infrastructure, and one of the largest populations of displaced Syrians living under Turkey’s precarious Temporary Protection regime. Joining families in their domestic spaces, I documented how they navigated minimum-wage labor, acute housing insecurity, and the ever-present threat of deportation. Combining participant observation with in-depth interviews in Arabic and Turkish with over a hundred interlocutors, my work uses sensory and visual ethnography to trace the tactile rhythms of survival. From tending to window plants to sharing a meager meal, I explore the quiet, everyday ways families cultivate familiarity in the face of enduring estrangement.