Kamyar was awarded the Department Citation in 2014 and the prestigious Clarendon Fellowship given to only the most distinguished graduate students across the disciplines at Oxford. He writes: ISF has been a springboard for all of my past and ongoing projects. I’ve had the great opportunity to be be a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) scholar, allowing me to travel to Turkey to complete my ethnographic fieldwork and publish in the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal. I will be attending Oxford in Fall 2014, and undertaking the MSc program in Migration Studies. In my spare time, I act as an American Representative of the Coordination Group of Afghan Refugees (www.afgrefugees.com). ISF has been an amazing home for me during my academic career, and I thank the program greatly for their consistent support of my endeavors, no matter how diverse my interests may have been.
Kamyar provides this abstract for his thesis What Does Citizenship Mean for Refugees Indefinitely Awaiting Third-Country Resettlement?”:
“Turkey is home to a population of over 20,000 Afghan refugees and asylum seekers who are awaiting permanent resettlement in a third country. These refugees exist in a unique legal and social space as they navigate the asylum process and simultaneously work as illegal laborers to provide for themselves and their families. In order to explicate the circumstances of Afghan refugee life, this paper will move beyond the concept of citizenship as a binary and instead disaggregate citizenship into its substantive and formal parts. This study explores the combination of substantive and formal characteristics of Afghan refugee life in Turkey in order to demonstrate how the resettlement process has produced a unique social condition that will be referred to as Afghan refugee citizenship: a mode of existence refugees characterize by its socio-economic difficulties and its uncertain temporality. This research explores this modality by drawing on ethnographic data based on the lives of Afghan refugees in Turkey alongside analysis of documents produced by governmental and intergovernmental institutions directly involved with the Afghan refugee population in Turkey.
