“Nothing But a Fighter”: An Exiled Kurdish Academic’s Journey Towards Human Rights Activism

This article presents an oral history of a Kurdish academic, examining how they narrate Kurdish identity under repression and how those meanings shaped their decision to escape Turkey to live in exile. The narrator was one of the participants of a dissertation on the erosion of academic freedom in Turkey and the experiences of academics in exile following the 2016 attempted coup. This article focuses on the oral history conducted as part of that project. This study can inform understandings of other stories, rather than claiming to represent all Kurds in Turkey. Therefore, I used an oral history approach to center the narrator’s testimony and analyze how they construct meaning about Kurdish identity under conditions of surveillance and risk, understanding that identity is socially constructed, interactional, performative, and situated within webs of significance. The findings offer insight into the personal dimensions of post-2016 repression in Turkey, the narrator’s account of seeking recognition of cultural and linguistic rights, and everyday mechanisms and policy dynamics that contributed to the academic purge and to academics’ decisions to live in exile.