Negotiating Boundaries of (Non)Belonging: Metapragmatic Accounts of Identity Labels in the Digital Narratives of Turkish Return Migrant Women
22nd International Conference on Turkish Linguistics (ICTL22), İzmir, Turkey, , İzmir, Türkiye, 4 - 05 Eylül 2025, ss.66, (Özet Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
- Basıldığı Şehir: İzmir
- Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.66
- Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
The exploration of digital language practices in superdiverse contexts is essential to understanding how transnational identities are constructed, negotiated, and expressed through complex linguistic and semiotic resources (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011). This study examines how Turkish return migrant women negotiate diasporic identities through the metapragmatic evaluation and recontextualization of multiple enregistered identity labels within a closed Facebook group established for returnees from Europe. It investigates how participants construct, reflect on, and reshape the indexical meanings of these labels– such as Almancı, Gurbetçi, Yabancı, Avrupalı, and Türk– as part of their identity work across interactional, discursive, and societal levels.
Drawing on 20-months of digital ethnographic fieldwork in a closed Facebook group, this study adopts a discourse-centred online ethnographic approach (Androutsopoulos, 2008) as its methodological framework. The group involves more than one thousand multilingual return migrant women of Turkish heritage who were born and raised in various Western European countries and later relocated to Turkey. The dataset consists of both Facebook interactions within this private digital space and ethnographic interviews conducted with active group members.
Findings reveals that participants strategically mobilize socially-saturated labels as discursive resources to index multiple, shifting, context-sensitive identity stances, allowing them to recalibrate their positioning across diverse social frames. This strategic engagement with naming practices plays a central role in the formation of a distinct returnee subjectivity, marked by liminality and ambivalent belonging. Ultimately, we discuss that identity labels are not merely used in interaction but become objects of metapragmatic reflection, ideological contestation, and stance-taking. As such, they function as key linguistic resources through which return migrant women construct difference, resist stigmatization, and negotiate their place within and beyond national and diasporic boundaries.