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  • Publication
    Radicalising homeland: agency, temporality and spatiality in Kurdish Freedom Movement's representations of Kurdistan
    (University College Dublin. School of Geography, 2022) ;
    0000-0002-0796-0595
    This research contributes to the understanding of the concept of homeland through a focus on agency, temporality, and spatiality. These have been underexplored in existing treatments of homeland in diaspora studies. Using a case study of the Kurdish diaspora and their nuanced understandings, portrayals, and practices of homeland, I have set out a new approach to the Kurdish political project built upon the geographical ties which connect people and land, what I have termed a ‘radical’ homeland. Through this innovative approach, I deal with the political construction of the meaning of homeland, without conflating it with the state and its spatialisation. The role of political agency in imagining, theorising, and representing homeland is greatly emphasised; this allows considering the ways people construct homeland narratives and collective identities. In terms of temporality, the introduction of the future projection mediates with the past, which is framed as a toolbox to locate the current mechanisms driving current day homeland narratives. This discloses the past as a place of multiplicity and therefore of a variegated spatiality. The research relies on texts and interviews produced by members of the Kurdish Freedom Movement in Europe. By following the flow of ideas underpinning the portrayal of Kurdistan, the collected material is organised according to the tripartition of production, circulation, and sedimentation of those ideas and the related configuration of the Kurdish homeland within Kurdish circles and broader audience.
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