Gülşah Türk Yiğitalp

Q1. Who are you?  

I am a PhD student in English Studies at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and I am working on the language policies for refugee students in Turkish public schools.

Q2. What was your motivation for applying for the FFVT fellowship? Why Germany? 

I thought FFVT was a very much needed network to share knowledge and work together with scholars of forced migration and I wanted to be a part of it. Scholars in Germany produce a great amount of academic knowledge on migration and therefore have expertise that I wanted to benefit from. 

Q3. What do you expect from the fellowship? 

I want to be able to discuss the analysis of my data with scholars whose research areas coincide with my research interests so that I can refine and improve its conceptualization. 

Q4. What is the focus of your work, and what is innovative about it? / What are your planned outcomes and activities for the fellowship period? And how do they relate to your FFVT hosting institution/ the FFVT cooperation project?

My work focuses on the processes through which language teaching functions as an apparatus of migration governance and refugee students' lives are governed in everyday interactions within schools. There is little research on language education for migrants linking it to the logics and practices of the broader migration regime and I hope to reveal this link more clearly. I will present my work at IMIS and have meetings with relevant scholars throughout the fellowship period. I will also attend scholarly events taking place at the institute to gain insight into the current research being done here. IMIS specializes in three areas which coincide with my research: migration regimes, forced migration, and migration societies. My work feeds from and contributes to all three areas so I believe it will be a very fruitful cooperation for me.