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Gözde Burcu Ege
DOCTORAL FELLOW
WALTER CHAPIN SIMPSON CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON |
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Profile
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Gozde Burcu Ege is a Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington. Her research interests include refugee studies, humanitarianism, and youth in the Middle East. She is currently writing her dissertation for which she conducted two and a half years of ethnographic research in Amman, Jordan. Utilizing mixed qualitative methods and long-term field ethnography in multiple Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, her dissertation investigates how Palestinian refugee-citizen youth who have long been conceived as recipients of humanitarian aid are themselves practicing voluntary humanitarianism in a context of ordinary precarity, receding international aid and new waves of refugees in Jordan. Fellowships from the University of Washington and Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship have supported her research.
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Burcu’s dissertation reorients the focus from refugees as subjects to agents of aid, particularly by investigating the overlooked concept of amal fityānī, which refers to a system of care within which refugee children are raised to become bearers of a Palestinian camp identity and leaders of their communities. Starting as a YMCA and UNRWA initiated summer camp for Palestinian orphans in the 1970s, ʿamal fityānī, culminated into a yearlong practice of care in camp associations creating a template for humanitarian engagement with children in and across the Jordan’s Palestinian refugee camps. Burcu’s dissertation illuminates the multiplicity of sensibilities that feed into youth’s humanitarianism; showing, for example, that while Islam as an ethical sensibility feeds into this humanitarianism, youth also strive to overcome what they see as ‘traditional Islamic’ approaches that emphasize charity. As the existence of new refugees, Syrians, in and around old Palestinian refugee camps leads INGOs to cooperate with camp associations, youth renegotiate their ideas about expertise and legitimacy to refine and achieve their aspirations for development.
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Burcu will be a part of a collaborative project, titled “Digitized Ethnographies: Humanitarianism(s) and Forced Displacement in the Middle East” in the Summer Quarter of 2021, for which she and her colleague Ayda Apa Pomeshikov earned the Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship from the Simpson Center. Throughout her studies, she has been appointed as a Teaching and/or Research Assistant for courses in Geography, JSIS, and History Department at the University of Washington, and she co-directed a UW Study Abroad Program, titled Anthropology of Modern Middle East: Ethnography of Jordan in the summers of 2015 and 2016. She is a native of Adana, Turkey, and completed her bachelor’s in Psychology and Sociology at Bogazici University. Burcu received an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University and wrote her master’s thesis on the Kurdish political movement and memories of the Armenian genocide based on fieldwork in Van, Turkey.
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Selected Writing
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Ege, Gozde Burcu. 2019. “Tarih ve Hafiza: Van’da Ermenileri Hatirlamak [History and Memory: Remembering the Armenians of Van].” In Caglayan, Ercan ed. Dunya’da Van: Nufus, Etnisite, Tarih ve Toplum [Van in the World: Population, Ethnicity, History and Society]. Istanbul, Turkey: Iletisim Yayinlari. Pg 209-228.
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Ege, Gozde Burcu. 2012. “Remembering Armenians in Van, Turkey.” Unpublished M.A. Thesis. Sabanci University, Turkey.
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