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December 19, 2018 - 12:00 am
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Address
Koc University Rumelifeneri Campus, Faculty of Social Sciences Building, SOS143 View mapMiReKoc Seminar Series continues with Nihan Yapar’s presentation on ‘Risk Attitudes of Syrian Refugees’ Decision-Making and the Works of Hiraeth Association’. The presentation and discussion will take place on Wednesday, December 19th, 2018, at 12:00, in SOS143. Registration is required for participants not affiliated with Koç University.
Title
Risk Attitudes of Syrian Refugees’ Decision-Making and the Works of Hiraeth Association
Abstract
This master thesis aims to explore the risk attitudes of refugees in decision-making, as well as the social networks that get involved in this process. For this analysis, the paper focuses on a group of Syrian refugees, who are related by kinship and tries to look into their attitudes on risk-taking, based on the time period of these group’s decision on whether or not to leave their country. This thesis also aims to investigate how the routines of thinking in social behaviour collapse when the departure point of migration is experiencing a catastrophe like war. Although this creates an urge to measure risk attitudes through quantitative methods, refugee studies need a much deeper understanding by acknowledging the uniqueness of every journey. Therefore the core of this paper tries to draw an anthropological view by combining both qualitative and quantitative methods: drawing on the fieldwork based on a group of Syrian refugees living in Istanbul’s Eyup district, alongside the insights of kinship on the subject of social networks and chain migration.
Short Biography
Nihan Yapar is currently a visiting fellow at MiReKoç and a master student in Urban Studies at Istanbul Sehir University who got her bachelor degree in Sociology from the same school. Since 2014, she has been actively involved in the field of Syrian refugee children’s integration through various social responsibility projects. In the summer of 2017, she and her friends established Hiraeth Association to better systemize their work and provide more sustainable benefits. She is currently taking an active role as a co-coordinator of the Bond Project for two years now, that focuses on developing children’s skills, tendencies and intelligence as well as their sustainable transitions into local schools. She is academically interested in discovering the role of risk attitudes in the decision-making period in her master thesis with a fieldwork based on a group of Syrian refugees living in Istanbul’s Eyup district.
Risk Attitudes of Syrian Refugees’ Decision-Making and the Works of Hiraeth Association
