Africans in the Relationship between Human Mobility and Disaster: The Case of Ankara-Turkiye

Turkey has been struggling to meet the basic needs of millions of people who came from Afghanistan and Africa, primarily due to the civil war in Syria, since 2011. The conservative government, with great pragmatism, turns a blind eye to the fact that the refugees, to whom it has given a status like those under temporary protection. It is no longer possible to manage the population that has come to Turkey with more than 10 million people, including those with or without documents, and asylum seekers, and has reached disaster levels. In this presentation, the strategies of African immigrants, whose numbers exceed one million in Turkey, the adaptation problems they experience, the communication and solidarity networks they have built using digital opportunities, and their visions of the future (return migration) will be analysed in relational sociological and intersectional terms. Various documents and qualitative data collected through interviews in the field will be presented. The preliminary findings of the study are that the increase in xenophobia throughout Turkey and the security forces' removal of immigrants from city centres in order to make them invisible, have led to the concentration of Africans who are excluded due to their race and are subject to multi-layered stigma, by sharing houses and establishing workplaces in poor neighbourhoods in urban peripheries. While their solidarity increases due to segregation, their integration decreases and their capacity to be a risk group for Turkey increases. In fact, the daily lives of Africans living in Ankara/ Türkiye will be shared as a digital ethnographic study by applying to the sociological film program announced by ISA for the Rabat Forum.