The Role of higher education in refugee integration: the case of Syrians in Turkey

This thesis is a compilation of three articles that aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of higher education in refugees’ integration by focusing on urban refugees’ experiences who settled in a neighboring country, studying the case of Syrian university students in Turkey. The res...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Dereli, Begüm
Tipo de recurso: tesis doctoral
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:CBUC, CESCA
Repositorio:TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red
OAI Identifier:oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/672985
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10803/672985
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Refugee
Integration
Belonging
Citizenship
Gender
Higher education
Refugiat
Integració
Pertinença
Ciutadania
Gènere
Educació superior
32
Descripción
Sumario:This thesis is a compilation of three articles that aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of higher education in refugees’ integration by focusing on urban refugees’ experiences who settled in a neighboring country, studying the case of Syrian university students in Turkey. The research is based on a qualitative case study conducted during the fall of 2019 in Gaziantep, a Turkish city on the Syrian border that hosts almost half a million Syrian refugees. This qualitative analysis of the refugee experiences aims to tackle a new perspective of their integration process by providing new insights into the refugee youths’ diverse experiences. Each article contributes to the academic literature from a different perspective. The first article uses the capability approach as a framework to explore the relationship between gender and their experiences focusing on their decision-making process while accessing higher education, the gendered nature of these experiences, and their aspirations after graduation. The second article aims to understand the factors that form refugees’ sense of belonging and the degree to which the contextualized experiences of refugees influence their sense of belonging in the university. And the third article contributes to the literature on the acquisition of Turkish citizenship by shedding light on the perspective of highly educated young refugees.