#LendThemYourEars
Lend Them Your Ears: Developing an Inclusive Research Activity to Co-Create with our Participants
We designed our research project to understand how European youths, native or migrant-origin, respond to the flows of globalization resulting in de-industrialization, unemployment, depopulation, geographical mobility, social-economic deprivation, spatial deprivation, and nostalgic deprivation. Our participants rely on diverse and occasionally clashing repertoires to express their discontent with the current social, economic, political, and spatial conditions. So far, however, we observed that they do not necessarily speak their minds in mutually exclusive terms.
In our interviews, we frequently come across profound and nuanced expressions that, we believe, are worthy of being shared widely outside of our academic publications. The quotes presented in this section make us think, even though we do not always agree with their content, rhetoric, or the terminology on which they rely. While processing their arguments in various ways in our research, we aim to keep our interlocutors’ voices as they want them to be heard as we believe we should be opening up conversations, not closing them down.
As Robert Young pointed out earlier in his seminal work, White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 2004: 5), it is not that they do not know how to speak, “but rather that the dominant would not listen.” In that spirit, we are very excited to introduce this new series where we share excerpts from our in-depth interviews. Listening and learning should be a staple of public debate. Therefore, we lend our ears to the often overlooked, ignored, unheard, or politically corrected voices. At the same time, this will serve as a platform for students, experts, and stakeholders who seek ways to make our societies more equal.
Lend Them Your Ears is one of the initiatives we started to share our research participants’ unfiltered experiences…
Adım
Ben üç şey biliyorum;
Dinlemekle dört kılana anlatacağım.
Özdemir Asaf
Step
I know three things;
I will tell them to the one who makes it four by listening.
Özdemir Asaf (Translation: Ayhan Kaya)
Ayhan Kaya, Principal investigator for the ERC PRIME Youth Project, European Institute, Istanbul Bilgi University
Ayşenur Benevento, ERC PRIME Youth Project Post-Doc Researcher, European Institute, Istanbul Bilgi University
Metin Koca, ERC PRIME Youth Project Post-Doc Researcher, European Institute, Istanbul Bilgi University
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Access below our complete presentation file, published on December 15, 2022:
