Life, Connectivity and Integration of Syrian Refugees in Turkey: Surviving through a Smartphone

This paper addresses the life and connectivity of Syrian refugees in Turkey. It is founded on an interdisciplinary research project that combines explorative qualitative methods and a Grounded Theory approach with a survey of 380 Syrian participants living in Zeytinburnu, Istanbul. It examines these refugees’ trajectories from the war situation in Syria to Zeytinburnu, and investigates how they have been using smartphones during the conflict, displacement and resettlement; how the use of smartphones affects their daily lives, social connections and integration; and the type of new uses they have discovered as survival and integration strategies. The author builds conceptual categories to describe how the smartphone has become a dispositif and a tool for survival and integration for the Syrian refugees in Turkey. This study also examines the response of Turkish mobile phone companies to the Syrian refugee crisis and the refugees’ need for connectivity, and how Syrian refugees use these telecom services according to their emerging needs in the Turkish and regional context.