Unraveling the Mobilization of Memory in Research With Refugees

Recruitment, Participants, Informed Consent

The small-scale, narrative multiple-case study involved five Kurdish refugee families resettled in Belgium who left their home region in southeastern Turkey after being persecuted for their affiliation with opposition groups or their Kurdish ethnicity. Participants were recruited in close cooperation with community organizations. In introductory meetings with potential participants, the objectives and procedures of the study were explained. Although almost all refugee families who were approached for participation responded positively, one family refused an introductory meeting and another family withdrew after one meeting because they did not want to bring discredit upon their community by sharing experiences and memories that diverge from the community’s collective story. During the introductory meeting with this latter family, the father shared his critical opinion about the current ideology and tactics of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and added how Kurds who openly disagree with the party line are rejected as traitors. He gave examples of withdrawing PKK members who were threatened or even killed, and explained that even in the host country, deviating from the dominant narrative of resistance and martyrdom may be punished by exclusion from the diasporic community. With the other five families, research cooperation was initiated and no further dropouts occurred throughout the course of the research process. The five participating two-parent families consisted of two to five children, of which there was at least one child of a minimum age of 12 years, to be included for participation. Before initiating research conversations, and throughout the course of research participation, considerable time was spent on negotiating informed consent. These conversations enabled researcher and participants to discuss issues of confidentiality, anonymization, and interpreter collaboration, and allowed for the explanation of the researcher’s independence from political organizations and institutions. Furthermore, participants’ freedom to refuse to answer interview questions, to stop the discussion or their engagement in the study, was explicitly emphasized. The research project was approved by the University’s Ethics Committee.

Data Collection and Analysis

Data collection entailed the consecutive administration of at least two in-depth, semi-structured narrative interviews with each participating family. All research encounters took place at the families’ homes and were conducted in close cooperation with interpreters, which enabled the respondents to express themselves in their mother tongue. In-depth interviews lasted between 1½ hours and 3 hours, were video-recorded with the permission of participants, and transcribed ad verbatim. These research procedures were preceded and followed by participant observation during families’ everyday activities, such as sharing meals, watching television, and spending time with child participants.

The first research procedure, which was mostly spread over two sessions, consisted of the administration of a semi-structured family interview with parents and children together and started with open queries on the family’s engagement with objects they considered meaningful in their practices of remembering life in their home region. Starting the interviews with this open exploration of meaningful objects allowed us to “work around” trauma, by emphasizing participants’ meaning-making of past and present without direct probing into concrete experiences of war and persecution (Rousseau & Measham, 2007). The second part of the family interview focused more directly on intrafamily trauma communication, again without pushing for the disclosure of traumatic life experiences. Rather, interview questions were aimed at inviting reflections about modalities, and concrete examples, of the participant-family’s communication patterns.

The second narrative interview procedure took place a few months later and entailed the administration of a semi-structured parent interview, including both parents of each family and using a tape-assisted recall (TAR) procedure (Elliott, 1986; Kagan, 1975). Video-based methods are increasingly being used in qualitative health research and may, for instance, involve the videotaping of medical consultations to examine communication between service users and health care providers (Parry, Pino, Faull, & Feathers, 2016). They may also involve the reviewing of video footage with participants involved in patient-safety research, to invite their reflections on visual data they have featured in themselves (Collier & Wyer, 2016). TAR is a video-reflexive procedure that has been employed in qualitative studies (e.g., Hooghe, Neimeyer, & Rober, 2012) such as psychotherapy process research (e.g., Raingruber, 2003; Rennie, 1992, 1994, 2001; Rober, Elliott, Buysse, Loots, & De Corte, 2008) to obtain information on the conversational partners’ unspoken reflections at certain moments, thereby yielding insight into the meaning of certain statements, hesitations, or silences. Concretely, TAR in previous qualitative research involved both the participants and researcher who looked back together at the video recording of a previous interview and could both stop the tape to add something, or to ask about unspoken reflections at certain moments in the interview (Hooghe et al., 2012). In the present study, the research team members jointly identified for each family three video fragments of the family interview that were considered meaningful for further exploration because they showed interesting interactions regarding trauma communication between family members. During the TAR procedure, and through consecutively introducing these fragments, the interviewer inquired about parents’ recollections of thoughts and feelings they had experienced at that point of the family interview, and explored their reflections on trauma communication in the parent–child relationship. Again, direct probing into memories of trauma was explicitly avoided by repeatedly emphasizing our respect toward parents’ protective acts of care that underpinned their choice to not talk about certain difficult memories with their children.

Interview transcripts of family and parent interviews were processed conducting both thematic and dialogic analysis of the interview material, following Riessman’s (2008) approach of these two methods of narrative analysis. In the thematic analysis, the main focus was on the content communicated by research narratives (participants’ reports of events and experiences). The dialogic analysis of the interview material mainly interrogated how these narratives were interactively produced among speakers (i.e., family members, interpreter, and investigator), and how both the local (micro) context of the research encounter (including the researcher’s positionality) and the broader (macro) contexts of community and society influenced narrative construction between speaker and listener (Riessman, 2008). Narrative analysis was conducted in different stages, gradually working toward the identification of prominent cross-case themes (Ryan & Bernard, 2003) concerning the process of intrafamily trauma communication.

For the purpose of the analysis presented in this article, we focused on the dialogical analysis of trauma communication, scrutinizing the co-construction of speech and silence related to trauma between participants, interviewer, and interpreter in light of the different research procedures and the broader sociopolitical context in which the narratives developed. We paid particular attention to notable moments of silence, hesitations, and participants’ first-time sharing of difficult memories during research conversations. In addition, we carefully analyzed participants’ meta-reflections on the narration of lived experiences of trauma and survival in the research relationship. Our reflections are drawn from extended team discussions, analysis of Kevers’s field notes, and reflective commentaries noted in analytic memos.

Relational Construction of Memory Narratives

Throughout the administration of in-depth, semi-structured family interviews, participants were invited to share their understandings of the family’s practices of trauma communication. Although we repeatedly emphasized that our study mainly aimed to address participants’ meaning-making on intrafamily trauma communication rather than to invite disclosure of traumatic experiences, research conversations contained rich descriptions of premigration traumatic predicaments and life experiences of collective violence and injustice. When inviting parents’ reflections on their experience of these earlier family interviews during the parent interview, one mother explained as follows:

I want to tell you that we are grateful for these conversations with you. While talking with you, some painful, heavy things of course came to the surface. Afterwards, for a day of two, I thought about those things, and felt worried about it. Yet we have also spoken about beautiful things, which was very nice. We talked about painful as well as beautiful memories, and that was good.

The open interview procedures used in our study may have invited participants’ elaborate accounts of suffering, as research methods are active strategies likely to influence the extent to which participants disclose or silence painful memories (Fine, Weis, Weseen, & Wong, 2003; Rosenbaum & Langhinrichsen-Rohling, 2006). Overall, the majority of participants evaluated remembering in the research context as positive, mentioning how it had enabled them to talk about feelings of loss and grief and recollections of survival in the family context, thereby contributing to a restoration of coherence and continuity in their life story. When videotape-assisted recall procedures confronted this same mother with images of herself talking about the transmission of Kurdish cultural identity to her son, she smiled and nodded, and said,

I find it comforting to watch these images [of the previous interview]: both me and my husband have succeeded in clarifying what we think, what we feel, and what we want to transmit to our children. Sometimes I wish to explain something, but I don’t manage to convey what I want. Yet, watching these images again, is very reassuring: I said what I meant to say.

In other cases, watching video fragments during the parent interview elicited intrusive recollections of trauma and loss in participants. In one family, of which both parents had been imprisoned because of their involvement in Kurdish resistance, the parent interview resulted in emotional accounts of their war-related experiences. One particular video fragment that aimed at a further exploration of intrafamily communication even elicited the father’s intrusive reexperiencing and first-time disclosure of experiences of torture and dehumanization suffered in prison. Worried about the disclosure of deeply traumatic experiences and the resulting disorientation that seemed to be elicited by the research procedure, we invited the parents’ reflections on this interview in a follow-up conversation, aiming to assess the extent to which research procedure might have harmed the parents and hoping to show our commitment to their well-being throughout the research process. The father reacted as follows:

You shouldn’t worry about it. Even listening to a song can make me feel very sad. Your goal is your research. You’re trying to understand something, and in order to do so, you must employ certain methods. Your methods are quite adequate. You shouldn’t worry about what you might have done wrong. I wish you the best luck with your PhD and your future career.

Here, it appears that subtle differences in social position between participants and researcher as well as the TAR procedure employed in the parent interview may have created an implicit coercive dimension (De Haene et al., 2010). Concretely, these parents seemed to relate their traumatic disclosure to a sense of loyalty to the researcher, who belonged to a powerful academic institution, assuming that rich accounts of their recollections would improve her work. Here, it cannot be ignored that narratives that develop in the research relationship, which largely remains an instrumental relationship as it aims to provide the researcher with rich descriptions and narratives (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2005), are inevitably steered by this particular discursive context. As a result of the intrusive recollections that were elicited in the abovementioned parent interview, we paid particular attention to the careful selection of video fragments for forthcoming interviews with the other participating families (e.g., by not selecting fragments that made reference to unspoken memories of trauma), aiming to reduce the risk of a disruption of participants’ defensive silences again.

During narrative interviews on refugee families’ memory practices, research conversations did however equally revolve around the families’ silencing of traumatic experiences and the related meanings of this silence. In the research conversations with one participating family, for example, the father’s deliberate silencing of his involvement in the Kurdish political and armed struggle became a topic of conversation. After exploring the good reasons he might have to silence these recollections, the mother introduced a metaphor:

Those four, five years, is a black box, it is covered in black, it is gone, we don’t know anything about it, we don’t have to know about it, we are not curious about it either.

In what followed, the researcher and family members explored the different meanings that are linked to keeping the box closed or imagining opening it one day. Taking this metaphor as a starting point for further exploration of family communication patterns, the following interaction occurred:

Ruth Kevers [RK]:If we take this black box as a metaphor for what we don’t want to think or talk about anymore. Father told us about his black box and that it is stacked and locked. And now I wonder—without meaning to force you to tell me what’s inside—whether you, mother and son, may also have such a box?

Son [silently]: Yes. The history box. The history box of [name home village].

RK: Can you help me understand what you mean by that?

Son: Those things I have experienced, that I couldn’t see my father anymore. And with the policemen. That I was scared.

[Interpreter puts her hand on the son’s shoulder]

Mother: He is right. The things we have seen and experienced are not easy things.

Father: From now on, our lives will be devoted to them [referring to his wife and children].

Navigating the fine line between coercing disclosure of long-silenced memories and reinforcing denial (Rousseau & Kirmayer, 2010), we attempted to support family members in understanding the silence in their family as a shared pattern of communication on experiences that were too unsafe or too difficult to explicitly address. By inviting the family members to explore the metaphor of the black box, we tried to initiate a conversation on how they dealt with unspoken memories in the family, without forcing them to reveal the content of their black box. In this short interaction, the interpreter’s nonverbal intervention also might have influenced the narrative that evolved throughout the research interview: At the moment the 13-year-old son referred to memories of trauma and loss, she attempted to console him by making a comforting gesture. By doing so, the interpreter might have decreased the son’s discomfort while showing the researcher and other family members this topic might be too sensitive to discuss. Subsequently, the father emphasized how the family’s life would change in a positive way and we turned to a different topic.

Overall, these research experiences reflect how remembering collective violence is a relational process negotiated in social interaction between a survivor who testifies and a receiver with whom memories and stories are exchanged (Weine, 2006). Concrete interactions during the administration of narrative interviews and videotape-assisted recall procedures as well as differences in social positions influenced participants’ accounts of trauma communication, indicating the co-construction of narrative and silence between researcher and respondents. In co-authoring the memory narratives and silences that develop throughout interviews, the researcher and interpreter can act as facilitators who, sometimes unintentionally, help transform previously untold or forgotten memories into the told (Gemignani, 2014); as well as attend to the untold during interviewing (Ghorashi, 2008), mediating participants’ communication about silenced experiences.

Moral Meanings of Memory

In-depth research conversations sometimes involved implicit and explicit references to man-made atrocities such as torture, humiliation, and violent death of significant others. When inviting participants’ reflections on why they considered it important to address such experiences in the research relationship, one mother replied,

This is not only about our family. There are so many people dying in our country, at this very moment. This conversation with you can maybe also be about them. The horrors we have been through are similar to what Kurdish people in Turkey are experiencing today. I consider it important to contribute, by talking about it or by somehow being the voice of these people.

This mother seemed to express the wish to do justice to those who do not have a voice of their own because they are severely oppressed or were killed through political violence, which might be understood as a specific example of altruistic motivation for research participation in the context of this study (Sikweyiya & Jewkes, 2013). The solidarity of this mother with the victims of current violence in her homeland in turn appealed to the researcher’s wish to somehow raise awareness of these ongoing injustices. By representing her account in scholarly contributions, the researcher would to some extent oppose the deliberate silencing of the state-sponsored violence in participants’ homeland as well as in the host country, whose denial of man-made atrocity cannot be maintained after listening to these testimonies (Mekki-Berrada, Rousseau, & Bertot, 2001). During the introductory meeting with another family, one of the sons repeatedly stressed the indignation and powerlessness he felt due to his many unsuccessful efforts to convince non-Kurdish people of the injustice Kurds are subjected to. Expressing his gratitude for our commitment to take the time to listen to his testimony, the son expressed his hope for an audience’s willingness to share the burden of his pain (Ashuri, 2010; Herman, 1992; Margalit, 2002). In the context of the research relationship, narrative interviews could be framed as potential places of testimony in which the researcher takes up social and moral responsibility by faithfully bearing witness (Appelbaum, 2008).

Research encounters also sometimes contained moments of long and painful silence, when memories addressed during interviews touched upon the lived experience of the absurdity and meaninglessness of ongoing cycles of violence and war. Toward the end of a family interview with one of the participating families, when the children had already left the room to go play, the father’s uncle, who also took part in the conversation, sighed and shared how talking about their ways of remembering the past had evoked strong feelings of loss and homesickness in him. He then started to cry and told us about the violent disappearance of one of his childhood friends at the hands of the Turkish state in the 1980s. Noting the mother’s and father’s sadness upon witnessing the uncle’s account, we wondered how to proceed with the conversation. After being silent with the family for a minute or so, we intervened,

RK: I feel there is nothing I can say that would ease your pain. I’m afraid that nothing I would say would be convenient. I really don’t know what to say.

Mother: You don’t have to say anything, really.

Uncle: This has nothing to do with you in particular. There’s just nothing meaningful to be said about this.

In the silence that followed this short interaction, we experienced how our refraining from soothing words was appreciated by participants, as we attempted to remain present to the lived experiences of meaninglessness and alienation imbuing their life story of collective violence and exile.

With regard to this transmission of lived experiences of suffering and traumatic predicaments in the research relationship, some participants expressed their concern for the researcher’s ability to cope with their disclosure of traumatic content. For example, toward the end of a parent interview in which the father had given us a glimpse of the moral quandaries implicit in being involved in armed conflict, he mentioned,

It was difficult phrasing my sentences, I had a lump in my throat. And I noted you were sometimes looking at the expressions on my face while I was talking. That was also difficult. . . . In Turkey, another psychologist, so someone with your profession, came to [name home village] to study the impact of war trauma and therefore she interviewed children. Afterwards she killed herself, and she left a letter in which she explained how difficult it was to hear all those sad stories. She must have felt what those children felt and couldn’t bear it.

By sharing this example, the father seemed to express his care for the researcher’s well-being, by implicitly drawing attention to the emotional repercussions implied in bearing witness to testimonies of trauma and atrocity. Through showing his concern for the researcher’s comfort, the research encounter may here have operated as a space in which human connectedness could briefly be restored.

Overall, narration and silence during research conversations with refugee families accounted for the search for meaning and the difficult confrontation with meaninglessness, thereby mobilizing moral themes in the research relationship. Witnessing or being exposed to deeds of man-made violence and atrocity tend to destroy survivors’ universe of meaning and experience of social connection (De Haene & Rober, 2016; Herman, 1992), thereby affecting the process of remembering trauma. Indeed, experiences of collective violence and displacement urge for expression to mobilize empathy and remembrance, yet at the same time, lived experiences of meaninglessness, absurdity, and alienation invoked by atrocity, may undermine the possibility to create narrative coherence (Eastmond, 2007; Uehara, Farris, Morelli, & Ishisaka, 2001). Although memory narratives may provide a moral framework for understanding and evaluating traumatic events and the overcoming of adversity (Fivush, 2010), unspeakable experiences of extreme powerlessness or moral dilemmas faced during times of combat and war will complicate the task of restoring a meaningful life in relation with other human beings. Here, the relationship that develops between researcher and refugee participants must always be understood against the backdrop of this breakdown of meaning and connection (Mekki-Berrada et al., 2001). The research context may indeed create a space for emotional and ethical engagement by the researcher, as bearing witness to testimony may decrease refugee participants’ social isolation and contribute to the reestablishment of social bonds and meaningful connections through the research relationship itself. However, the reestablishment of fragments of meaning must always be anchored to a recognition of the radical lack of meaning participants may have faced. The researcher’s ability to remain present to these feelings of absurdity and the failure to create narrative continuity might prove to be as important as attempting to restore meaning and purpose (De Haene, Rober, Adriaenssens, & Verschueren, 2012; Rousseau & Measham, 2007).

Collective Voices of Memory

During research encounters, participating refugee families proudly introduced us to their cultural habits; for instance, by preparing traditional meals, teaching us Kurdish vocabulary, putting on traditional music, inviting us to participate in typical dances, and offering us symbolic gifts (e.g., a bracelet in the Kurdish colors). It seemed that this mobilization of the researcher into their cultural universe was a very important aspect of participation for respondents and was in fact closely related to collective processes of memory. First, given that the Kurds in Turkey have faced forced assimilation and denial of their language and ethnic identity for decades (Gunes & Zeydanlıoğlu, 2014), celebrating their cultural identity in the relationship with the researcher appeared to allow participants to demonstrate their active involvement in a collective project of reconstructing Kurdish cultural identity in the diaspora, an important concern of Kurdish community organizations and their leaders, who consider this reclaiming of cultural rights as a key sign of resistance toward the ongoing repression in Turkey (Toivanen, 2015). Second, participants’ celebration of aspects of cultural heritage in the research setting often also permitted them to remember past communal suffering. It was remarkable to note how some of these cultural vehicles of memory were shared by several participants, as can be seen from the following extract from our field notes:

While drinking tea after finishing a research interview at the house of one participating family, the oldest daughter plays songs on her smartphone. I am struck by the melancholy in one particular song. The daughter is humming and the other family members are singing along. They tell me this song is of particular importance for Kurdish people, as it tells the story of a young man heading to the mountains to join the guerrillas—a situation many Kurdish families can identify with.

This example shows how collective vehicles of memory, in this particular case a Kurdish song, were mobilized in the research relationship. Furthermore, we were provided with an intriguing insight into the interweaving of participants’ personal–familial and cultural–political memory narratives a couple of weeks later, when we visited another family with the aim of conducting a family interview:

Before starting the formal interview procedure, my interpreter and I are talking with the mother of the family. The interpreter recounts how she has enjoyed the ride to the family’s home, listening to traditional Kurdish music on the way; and I respond saying that I recently discovered some Kurdish songs, subsequently playing the melancholic song I learned from the other family on my phone. Both mother and interpreter close their eyes, silently humming to the melody. Suddenly the mother starts to cry and withdraws to the bathroom. While she’s there, my interpreter tells me this song evokes strong emotions in all Kurds who have lost loved ones in the conflict. Upon her return, the mother tells me that hearing this song strongly reactivated memories of her brothers, who all died or disappeared as guerrillas.

Here, we were allowed to observe how the interpreter’s activity in bridging the linguistic and cultural gaps between researcher and participants added another voice to the production of narrative accounts, as she consciously or unconsciously brought fragments of her own background and history, which she shared with our participants, into the conversation (Temple & Edwards, 2002). Because of this shared background and history, participants and interpreter somehow seemed to tacitly understand each other.

In conversations with some of the participating families, we witnessed some recollections that deviated from the predominant glorification of freedom fighters by the Kurdish community, for example, in stories that accounted for an experience of disillusionment evoked by the devastating impact of ongoing cycles of violence on people’s thoughts and actions. During a parent interview, one father recounted how living in a violent context had had a deep impact upon him:

War profoundly influences people. It is impossible to resist it. War brings you to a point where you feel you would want to kill your old friends. You don’t want it, but war imposes it on you. You undergo it and you are molded to a certain point where you actually would do it. That is what war does to people.

Subsequently, the father told us that in the time when he was engaged in Kurdish armed resistance, he had been asked by the group’s leaders to punish one of his comrades who was accused of disloyalty. He recounted that he had refused to take part in this punishment, and that from then onward, he had preferred to retain his independence and to refrain from official membership of the party. This somehow put him in an outsider position in the community, in which PKK members were usually praised and idolized. Such accounts exemplified the disruption of community bonds caused by decades of armed conflict, continuing into the diaspora. However, the overall scarcity of such accounts also demonstrated how testifying of lived experiences of trauma that deviate from more collective representations of past events is particularly difficult, even in the “private” context of the research relationship.

Overall, in our study with Kurdish refugee families, collective voices of memory were actively mobilized as well as contested throughout the research process. Diasporic communities’ remembering and forgetting of war and persecution is a complex and multifaceted process, given that collective memory narratives have to be negotiated between first- and second-generation refugees, across the borders of homeland and host country, and between community members whose experiences of war and persecution sometimes greatly differed (Lacroix & Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2013). Here, it is important to bear in mind that collective violence tends to fundamentally disrupt the social fabric of communities (Derluyn, Vindevogel, & De Haene, 2013), which in turn complicates the process of constructing shared narratives of the past in exile. Although a community’s connection with its past will therefore always be ambivalent and provisional, collective practices of memory are constitutive elements in the making of a community and may create greater group boundedness and cohesion within and between generations (Margalit, 2002; Pickering & Keightley, 2013). Within a research context that is rooted in a particular refugee community, the researcher is sometimes confronted with the fragmentation of collective memory as well as mobilized in shared practices of remembrance. In view of ethically rigorous research practice, the researcher will have to pay close attention to how the community’s collective interest is invoked in participants’ narrative accounts, although one may equally encounter dissonance between individual recollections and collective memory.

Sociopolitical Resonances of Memory

All participating families repeatedly emphasized what they perceived as the host society’s deficient perception of the Kurds’ history of repression and resistance. In the first stages of research participation, participants regularly tried to assess our perspective on Kurdish politics, inquiring how our family and friends judged our academic involvement with a refugee community that is often designated as showing support for “terrorist organizations” (the PKK is listed as such by Turkey, the European Union, and the United States). Hoping to reverse this perception in the host society, several participants expressed the hope that the representation of their recollections of uprooting, forced assimilation, imprisonment, and humiliation in our research report would be widely read by Belgian citizens, providing nuance to the common generalization of Kurds as terrorists. During family and parent interviews, participants’ strong orientation toward gaining public recognition of their cultural identity and history of oppression in the host society profoundly affected remembering processes in the research context. For example, the father of one of the participating families shared a childhood memory of human rights violations conducted by Turkish soldiers during a family interview, with his young children present. Reflecting on these accounts later in the parent interview, he stated,

I had told that story before, for example to a couple of sociologists who came to [name home village] and during the asylum interview upon my arrival in Belgium. However, it was the first time I told it in the presence of my wife and children. The reason why I decided to tell it, was precisely the conversation with you. Given that you asked about it, given that you will write about it, given that you might include it in your research texts. It will be put on paper. That is why I considered it meaningful to share it.

Here, the father’s reflections illuminate that remembering in the research context may sometimes operate for political purposes, which may be in tension with the protective silencing of trauma-related content in family relationships, or could indicate how the research relationship may have provided a safe space of sharing within family relationships. In any case, the father seemed to voice the hope that attempting to convey his recollections of organized violence to the researcher would, to some extent, make the brutality of war and collective violence known to a larger public, by its inclusion in the researcher’s writings.

Relatedly, throughout the research process we became aware of the difference in research agendas of researcher and participants: Some participants seemed to expect our research to fulfill a clearly activist role in the political realm. During the parent interview with one participating family, the conversation revolved around the distant history of their home region, which had been inhabited by Kurds and Armenians from different religious movements. After the mother and father had explained that they hide their true religious background for safety reasons, they remarked,

Father: I propose that later on, we sit down together and really talk about politics!

Mother: You are our representative, you are the spokesperson of the Kurdish community in Europe, we grant permission for you to go to the parliament!

Along the same lines, the father of another family explicitly asked us to attend public demonstrations:

We want our country to be free, we want the Turkish state to leave us alone and we want our leader [Abdullah Öcalan] to be released from prison. As long as our leader is in prison, our situation will not improve. . . . Wherever a protest or demonstration is organized, we try our best to attend. Once, we also saw you at such an event. We want you to come every time!

Weighing the ethical pros and cons of such an extended engagement, we limited our research activities to lengthy family visits and research conversations complemented by participant observation in some cultural and political activities, in the latter of which we explicitly refrained from wearing political symbols or cheering slogans. Furthermore, we did engage in raising awareness by regularly sharing news reports about the distant history as well as the current upsurge in political violence in Turkey’s Kurdish regions on our social media accounts. Yet, given the difficulties encountered in developing a joint research agenda with participants, we did worry that our failure to meet their expectations could add to participants’ feelings of social isolation and marginalization.

Overall, research conversations with Kurdish refugee families strongly resonated sociopolitical meanings, as the researcher was mobilized to reverse the public silence or nuance the stereotyped perception of the Kurdish community and its association with threat. Given our affiliation to a powerful university institution and our privileged position as members of a majority group, research participants judged us to be suitable spokespersons for their community, able to pass on their stories to native Belgian citizens in the host society. The political aims underpinning many participants’ memory practices, such as to challenge impunity in their home country and to restore justice, echo the macro sociopolitical context of ethnic persecution, social injustice, and authoritarian regimes (Brough, Schweitzer, Shakespeare-Finch, Vromans, & King, 2013; Kurze, 2016). Here, the sociopolitical dynamics at stake in participants’ accounts of memory intersect with the researcher’s sociopolitical research ethics (Vandekinderen, Roets, & Van Hove, 2014): Participants’ hope for the research to have a political effect and the transmission of their suffering in the research context may mobilize the researcher’s solidarity. To develop ethically responsible research practice with marginalized groups, the researcher must take the larger dynamics in the interview setting and the broader sociocultural context into account (Nagar-Ron & Motzafi-Haller, 2011) and, subsequently, assume social responsibility in attempting to transform situations of ongoing violence and social injustice (Fine et al., 2003; Rousseau & Kirmayer, 2010). Yet, in trying to raise public awareness in partnerships with refugee participants, the researcher may be confronted with expectations of participants that might lead to a blurring of professional boundaries (Dickson-Swift, James, Kippen, & Liamputtong, 2006). Nevertheless, aiming for meaningful collaboration with research participants is crucial, otherwise the mismatch between the researcher’s agenda and the needs of the participant-community may imply that the study is unethical from the community’s point of view (Brunger & Wall, 2016).