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This article explores the case of the migration studies industry in Turkey, which has flourished over the past decade, through an examination of knowledge production on refugee labour. Focusing on research about Syrian refugees’ labour and employment in Turkey between 2012 and 2018, the article discusses the ways in which refugee labour is articulated and studied to provide ground for a wider critique of migration-related knowledge production. This study aims to reflexively question academic outputs by (1) exploring the conceptual frames used broadly in research on refugee labour, and (2) developing an overview of the literature on Turkey with a focus on this topic. Through the case of the literature on refugee labour in Turkey, we explore the underlying political economy premises of migration research. This case serves as an example to argue that knowledge produced in a Southern context is mainly incorporated as case studies despite attempts to advance theoretical discussions, highlighting a North–South hierarchization of knowledge.

This article examines social relations for Syrian women in Istanbul by focusing on micro-level lived relationships of hospitality. Through an ethnographic, qualitative approach to key sites of encounter, the article explores how migrants navigate a public milieu in which hospitality has partially been taken away from the local community’s moral oversight in a context of a national political discourse on hospitality. We also analyze ‘hosting’ and ‘guesting’ as mutually negotiated and contested practices. This study highlights the agency and resistance strategies of Syrian women to their ‘differential inclusion’ into Turkish society. It examines how they navigate (in)hospitality and also unpacks the use of virtuous dimensions of hospitality (1) to reverse discriminatory ethnic and class discourses and renegotiate subjectivities that are imposed upon them as ‘guests’; (2) to bring forward perceived cultural similarities between Syria and Turkey; and (3) to revalorize their roles and status in their families. The contribution of this study is to focus on hospitality as a means of theorizing how women navigate complex and conflicting, familiar and yet also new, social ecologies as they make themselves at home.