Displaced voices Re imaging the self in select syrian refugee women autobiographies

Abstract

This thesis examines selected autobiographical narratives by Syrian refugee women to explore how life writing functions as a site of identity reconstruction, narrative activism, and resistance in the context of war, displacement, and exile. Situating itself at the intersection of life-writing studies and refugee studies, the research analyses four memoirs authored by women from diverse social and professional backgrounds, including childhood activism, disability advocacy, sports, and literary witnessing. Through close textual analysis, the study demonstrates that these narratives move beyond mere documentation of suffering and strategically reconfigure the refugee subjects as agentive, visible, and politically engaged. The theoretical framework draws primarily on Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s concepts of autobiographical subjectivity and identity construction, which illuminate how selfhood is consciously shaped through genre, voice, and narrative positioning. This framework is further enriched by E. F. Kunz’s Kinetic Model of Refugee Movement and Vamik D. Volkan’s theory of refugee trauma, enabling a nuanced understanding of displacement as both a structural and psychological experience. Together, these approaches reveal how trauma, mobility, and memory influence narrative form and self-representation. The thesis identifies significant generic diversity across the texts, including the autobiographical manifesto, human rights narrative, jockography, and testimonio, demonstrating how genre choice itself becomes a narrative strategy. By foregrounding lived experience, collective witnessing, and public engagement, the memoirs perform narrative activism and resist reductive humanitarian representations of refugee women as passive victims. Ultimately, the study argues that Syrian refugee women’s autobiographies constitute a powerful literary intervention that transforms personal narratives into acts of cultural resistance, global advocacy, and self-authorship, thereby making a substantive contribution tocontemporary refugee literature and women’s life-writing.