TURKEY ON SCREEN! We, the diasporic youth talking about the Homeland - Visual Elicitation Study of Turkish Diasporic Youth’s Identity and Place Perception

By inquiring into the narratives and system of discourses, this study explores the identity and place-based perception of the Turkish diasporic youth. Specifically, this study is concerned with how being born and raised in a country different than the home country impacts the selfidentity construction and the perception itself of the country of origin. To that end, 12 Turkish immigrants based in the Netherlands have been interviewed according to an intersection of video-elicitation technique integrated within semi-structured interviews. The use of moving pictures arises out semiotically as a social practice, by means of which hidden nuances of the everyday life are unraveled and alternative meaning-making are conveyed. Under the following premises, the screening of 6 short movies has been employed as a springboard for discussion. The theoretical framework of this study is rooted in the constructionist and interpretive approach of symbolic interactionism, according to which the self emerges out of the dichotomy of the domestic and public sphere, shaping the Me and the I. Moreover, this study has been colored by the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, in regard to the Habitus and Cultural Capital. Tracing the results of the thematic analysis, three main factors have been identified as playing a considering role in influencing diasporic youth’s perception. First of all, the family environment as well as the public one, materialized in the very concept of Habitus, lay out the groundwork for the identity construction process. Intrinsically attached to the latter, another factor identified is the concept of Cultural capital, through which not only the participants' practices in terms of language, traditions and customs, but also their reception of the movies has been understood. Finally, the difference in gender and the implication of it on the representation of the self has furthermore confirmed the finding, according to which the identity and the perception of the home country differs and develops across the habitus, the cultural capital and the gender. As a result, the diasporic youth’s identity remains in between the here and the there in a continuous dualism between the inner and the outer self, as being the eternal foreigners bouncing at the backdrop of the domestic versus the public dichotomy.