OSRA Grant Cycle 2 Public Reports: Project Title: Unfamiliar Families: Syrian Refugees’ Transnational Solidarity and Kinship Networks

In this project, we followed an interdisciplinary, comparative and long-term ethnographic approach to study Syrian transnational refugee families in Greece and Italy. Syrian families have been impacted severely by the war in Syria. Family members are held up back home in Syria, have fled their homeland to neighboring countries, or crossed the Mediterranean to reach the shores of Europe. There, in ‘Fortress Europe’, many were stopped in periphery countries, such as Greece and Italy. Subjected to increasingly anti-immigrant, racist and Islamophobic, nationalist and EU border policies, the journey of many Syrian refugees aimed to Central Europe was cut short.

We chose Greece and Italy as our research sites, because they are part of the so-called ‘periphery of Europe’ with a long tradition of receiving migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa especially through the Mediterranean sea. Both are ‘transit countries’ where migrants, asylum seekers and refugees often live in smaller nuclear family units or alone, waiting to relocate and/or be reunited with their families elsewhere.