The Interview: Scholarship, Sincerity, Suspicion
The following is a recently published book chapter in ‘Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice’ (2026), edited by Natasha Tanna, Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez, and Hakan Sandal-Wilson. You can download and read the book, published with UCL Press, for free here.
I left institutional academia in 2023 and do not normally invest in academic publishing any more. I tend to already disagree with myself by the time something gets published! Hence, this brief intro.
I have written on different occasions about the highly political nature of knowledge production on Kurdistan. Given the immense role of narrative frameworks in the context of what more people are coming to call ‘Third World War’, the things that I did write on this issue do not even scratch the surface of the complex world-historical and social-intellectual implications. In the absence of a more political reading of the role of scholarship for global power agendas, I was never critical enough. Generally, over the past fifteen years, almost no sophisticated deep and broad reflection emerged to tackle the issue of epistemology and geopolitics in the context of Kurdistan. This is still the case. But that’s a topic for another essay.
On the personal scale, however, many became aware of ‘lived experiences’ of epistemic injustice. And this is - kind of - what this chapter is about. Over the past decade and a half, many people, including myself, had their labor and time exploited by people with questionable intentions in the name of research. Psychologically imprisoned by factors like the historical invisibility of the Kurdish people, even the basic reflex to challenge, with sophistication, the stereotypical figure of the extractive researcher was delayed in many ways. (Every shitty project draft felt like solidarity, and you were supposed to feel grateful for the attention). When people with years of political experience and complex understandings of deeper power dynamics would raise thoughts about how much of this knowledge industry is entangled with intelligence gathering and hegemonic narrative-making, it was easy to dismiss them as authoritarian and paranoid, as conspiracy theorists.
Fighting such dynamics is important, as they continue a long and violent legacy of colonialism. But in the context of globalized liberal identity politics, this can also be a distraction from much bigger questions, including those mentioned earlier. Anyway, especially after leaving academia, I could not be bothered to unpack the many outputs that pass as scholarship. There are far bigger fish to fry.
So why this text then? It is a form of creative closure with some academia-related questions that used to occupy me in the past. With its deliberately dramatic tone, hidden meanings, inside jokes, especially the ‘play’ part is not really supposed to be fully understood, not academically legible at least. It a parody of a world - and of even my own feelings, sense of self, etc. It was an experimental and, frankly, fun way to deal with a terrain that used to feel like a priority battlefield, a site of tension. In that sense, it captures and expresses personal history.
If I were to re-write the chapter with my current perspective, I would include more on the ways in which aspects of the Kurdish movement and milieus around it politically and intellectually created some of the problematic epistemic dynamics that I critique here. I would reflect more self-critically, and, instead of resorting to the easy solution of identity-and-ideology-based-defensiveness, I would break stifling taboos and add further layers of irony and contradiction to highlight - relatively or seemingly - vulnerable people’s relationship to power and reality-making. I began writing some reflections on these matters some while ago here, with hopefully more coming soon.
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The interview: scholarship, sincerity, suspicion
Clarity is key to academic knowledge production, which - at least in theory — derives its strength from its ability to make sense of complex, connected phenomena through objectivity, nuance and critique. While the merits of this approach are widely known, scholarly representations of real-life situations are necessarily limited by conventional epistemic forms — hegemonic inside academia — and the material conditions that organise knowledge under capitalism in a nation-statist world system.
Since 2014, the year in which Kurdistan entered mass global consciousness due to the massacres of and the resistance against the so-called Islamic State, Kurdish people, women in particular, have interacted with thousands of people from around the world, who came into their lives with countless questions and agendas. In this period, marked by intensive periods of war, military operations, occupation campaigns, forced displacement, mass incarceration and numerous assassinations in Kurdistan, many people with links to foreign governments, political parties, intelligence services and embassies, presented themselves as independent researchers, who had come to produce objective, ‘policy-relevant’ knowledge on the newly-discovered Kurds. One major dynamic shaping the interaction between researchers and interlocutors is the terror-labelling of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) not only by regional countries, but by powerful geopolitical actors such as the US, the EU and individual European countries.
Over the period of a decade, I tried to navigate this complex terrain, as a young researcher, volunteer amateur translator and organiser. One of the most insight-offering aspects of my experience has been the chance to observe how the ways in which different people and groups, due to their political and geopolitical positioning in the world system, inhabit different epistemic worlds, and how this often makes their references for truth and reality nearly irreconcilable with those of others. Growing up around the spiritually and politically rich cosmology of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and seeing the ways in which it came to be represented in emerging scholarly accounts, I have long been intrigued by the lack of reflection even among critical scholars on their ideological positionality, especially in the context of interview settings and ethnographic accounts. Having myself been in different positions of various interview settings (researcher, interviewee or translator), and as someone who produces knowledge in a politically engaged way (now outside of academia), I at times found behavioural dynamics around interviews more revealing than the verbal exchanges constructed as their content. Dynamics are often further inflamed in a context of violence and repression.
In interviews, activists in the Kurdish women’s liberation movement usually not only talk about their lives when engaging with outsiders, but, in line with ideological-political cultures and convictions, also systematically relay entire worldviews and values that inform the way they move and act in the world. To some researchers, however, as I gleaned from conversations with interviewees and my own observations in the field and in the literature, the believability of Kurdish women’s self-making narratives hinges upon a liberal, secular sense of coherence. A certain lack of understanding or patience towards oppressed and struggling people’s freedom dreams, coupled with overstatements of the implications of one’s findings, can result in a failure among researchers to read the affective meanings attributed to people, causes and ideals. For example, from the perspective of Kurdish revolutionaries, activists and ordinary people, who were largely invisible in literature until 2014, it is often seen as a duty to perform one’s people’s pride, to do justice to repressed histories and to remember martyrs. Mantra-like repetitions of political lines, believed in, embodied and died for, are cultural world-making tools. Researchers who embark on research quests with the frequently stated objective of wanting to explore gaps between ‘romanticised’ discourse and ‘objective’ reality, fail to realise that spoken words must not necessarily be interpreted as definite statements on already achieved situations, but rather as optimistically expressing a sense of duty to fight for political possibilities, the outcomes of which depend on collective struggle. Given the high rates of martyrdom in Kurdistan, speech acts of revolutionaries are also a form of self-making and memorialisation. The interview is an opportunity to archive and immortalise one’s individual self by speaking one’s lived or imagined meanings into recorded history. These ritualistic remembrances, in turn, have frequently been dismissed as superficial, performative ‘official lines’, by feminist researchers, who, for their own purposes, were keen on capturing complexity and vulnerability. Their curiosity or insistence on pursuing certain lines of interrogation (such as individual stories to describe agency, with effort to identify instances of tension, contradiction and failure to signal a ‘critical lens’) can be met with impatience by their interlocutors. While scepticism is a key tool of academic critique, it is not always a mindset that political movements, especially those with revolutionary utopias and mass appeal, can afford. Or rather, the respective objects of critique can diverge greatly. Beyond the immediate material political context marked by asymmetric power relations, interactions between researchers and interlocutors often also express different senses or concerns around security, morality, historiographic responsibility, temporality, audience, cosmology, epistemic and linguistic affect and awareness of social complexities.
Meanwhile, another common curatorial practice among researchers, journalists and translators is to — seemingly for a higher purpose — boost and further embellish with meaning and depth, claims, sometimes questionable ones, nonchalantly uttered by their interlocutors, especially if these are in one way or another in positions of relative vulnerability. While care, feelings of solidarity and empathy, a sense of justice or belief in change may drive them, such tendencies also often display projection, that is, ways of validating researchers’ own undeclared desires and dreams. What safer way to communicate one’s politics, within the framework of liberal universities nonetheless, than indirectly, through the stories of others, in grant-generating papers?
Of course, the oppressed and the resisting, too, sometimes deceive, exaggerate, misrepresent or manipulate. They sometimes feel they must. Accounts and narratives can shape the course of events, especially in the current age of communication.
These and other questions become even more morally urgent in contexts marked by violence and loss. What are the ethics of making framing statements about people who are in struggle during an interview and die for their ideals soon after? In what ways does the increasing adherence of higher education institutions to neoliberal market demands impact researchers’ ability to produce intellectual labour with historical, political and philosophical depth and awareness?
The following is an experiment in conveying suppressed (inter)personal and political sentiments and dynamics in interview settings that undoubtedly exist (alongside geopolitical realities), but are, for various reasons, including professional etiquette, considered inappropriate to acknowledge: poor communication, tension, vanity, anxiety, pettiness, jealousy, arrogance, deceit, boredom, manipulation and calculation, among others. It is a satirical critique based on personal experience as well as conversations with research interlocutors, activists, researchers and translators. The scenario constructed here is fictional, but the dynamics represented reflect a caricature appreciable by those familiar with the context of research around Kurdistan in the past decade.
My argument is implicitly conveyed and relates to epistemology. I take the liberty to communicate, albeit theatrically, things that I just feel that I know. This means that while I did not systematically, scientifically, methodically study the dynamics I problematise, I hold that, at the very least, I should be free to be honest about believing that sometimes some insights are simply true, and that I know that I know certain things just because I know. In most moments in life, human beings behave in society based on such cognition. Below, the dramatised parts of the chapter challenge what I see as a categoric (though often selective) hostility within academic scholarship towards people’s intuition. Stemming from things like political sensitivity and emotional intelligence, intuitive knowledge develops not sporadically through ‘the literature’ but cumulatively in life. As an epistemic source, embodied knowledge is frequently fetishised in gender and race studies, but rarely taken seriously when it is a classed meaning-making position or diverts from the ideological liberalism prevalent within academia.
Conventional approaches to research can furthermore rob researchers of the ability to note or value the mysteries of the universe — in this case, for example, the psychic connections that can develop between travellers on the same path, or the prophetic dreams and visions that feel very real to people, who often also act on them. It castrates imagination and knowledge of the human experience. During my PhD fieldwork and subsequently, during my write-up, I, too, had enigmatic encounters that I did not write about, as they neither had meaningful space within accepted scholarly conventions nor within their critiques. I suppressed entire spiritual worlds, truths, inside of me, in the effort to be taken seriously as a scholar in what is essentially a dogmatically secular field of operations, meant for a minority gaze.
Throughout, to challenge the vanity within ideas around scholarly rigour and individual authorship, I deliberately confuse the reader by blurring the lines between the self and the other, academia a nd life, reality and drama, to recreate a sense of emotional and intellectual chaos that often accompanies research and writing. Various aspects of this chapter are also humorous and self-critical takes on tendencies within feminist (and other) forms of qualitative knowledge outputs that draw on various methodological tools and engage in word acrobatics to communicate researchers’ own agendas, desires and frustrations in apolitical, yet seemingly scholarly ways, to the often extremely small number of people who can access academic publications and the even smaller groups that bother to read the work.
*
The interview is about to begin. The phones are going to be put in the other room. The researcher is visibly irritated. Her ethnographic method will be compromised.
I need to use my phone to record the conversation.
You don’t have a recording device? You can use mine, no problem. But we can’t have phones here.
Why? Isn’t that a bit ... extreme? I’d like to move around freely to get a sense of your lives.
This is part of the security measures here; I thought you knew that. Also, can you please not take photos here? I’ll let you know when and where you can.
Does everyone here have to obey such rules?
She seems unhappy about the measures.
Every day, another liability! What are we bringing upon ourselves...
Look, let’s try to make her comfortable, you know how they represent these things to the outside — coercion, paranoia ...
Ouf, these people truly don’t know a thing about the real world. Maybe she would join our class on surveillance? What do you think?
Do you want me to translate that?
And so, the interview starts.
On a scale from one to ten, how do you rate ... ?
We don’t subscribe to positivist knowledge paradigms that quantify and measure life along...
The interviewee elaborates at length on their collective critiques of the hegemonic forms of social science. Unimpressed, the researcher writes down a single sentence. Anyway, as a qualitative researcher, she did not like such questions either, but she had been told that quantitative papers were more likely to attract funding and publication. The first half hour passes in similar fashion. It is within the profession of both researchers and revolutionaries, the art of not exhibiting one’s boredom.
A sensitive question is posed. The response needs to strike a balance between politics and truth. Too much or too little of either will create either geopolitical risk or spiritual harm.
The translator raises her eyebrows. The interviewee raises hers back. They telepathise for a few moments.
Please don’t mess this up. We worked hard to get you this sort of attention.
What do you want me to do? Lie? Bluff? Why are we doing this?
You don’t understand how these people think, but I do. I know what you want to say but you can’t say that, it will backfire.
What am I supposed to do then? Talk about the weather?
Don’t make our other efforts fall apart with your dogmatism in one instance. Speak in their language to get empathy. Don’t you remember what happened after the last reporter?
I want empathy for my truth. Our martyrs did not die for us to write a soap opera version of our struggle! Translate everything exactly as I say.
As the two women, who will appear in the outputs as author and interlocutor respectively, lean back in their seats with a sense of ennui, a pendulum swings back and forth between them. This is the translator, whose body mobilises into awkward shapes in the quest to facilitate this encounter. A politically-engaged person herself, diasporic, she struggles to do justice to both worlds. Her blood pressure rises as the interviewee depicts a life of harsh conditions. Her heart smiles as she hears stories of resistance. She grows pensive as the researcher asks questions. Her critical faculties get stimulated, she visualises new ideas with interest and excitement. Although her presence is passive and her labour invisible to the consumers of both the research output and the movement’s outward appearance, this nameless volunteer, too, has a stake in the outcome of this interaction. As she carries the burden of weaving a bridge of understanding (and maybe even solidarity), she also holds power over communication and information. Her interpretations will, to some extent, define the course of history. By the end of the interview, her facial expressions will have covered a palette of human emotions. She is self-conscious and afraid that her complex inner rollercoaster will reflect as unreliability. Increasingly sorry for herself, the translator’s face begins to grow tense, subliminally signalling a sense of exhaustion to the others. Come on guys, you know what’s going on. Help me out here.
The other two observe the translator’s ordeal. A staring contest begins. Who is going to benefit from this round of translation? Concentrating, each one tries to pick up words that they recognise from the other’s language. The translator’s eyes scan the room for cues, searching for higher epistemological guidance. Her word-summoning fingers look like those of a witch performing magic. A referee, on trial by suspicious parties, who clearly is trying her best. But it is not clear to anyone, herself included, whether she grapples with the language or with how to best present one’s words to the other.
I want to talk about sexuality.
Ob-vious-ly.
See what she is after? The interviewee smirks at the translator, who briefly twitches her eyebrows. The researcher is intrigued. The telepathy session is interrupted by the scratching sound of her previously resting pen. The native eyebrow pairs relax and curve over two artificial smiles. The interviewee calmly communicates familiar lines in response to the anticipated question. Impatient with the bureaucratic tone, the researcher suddenly turns to the translator.
So, what about you? Why don’t you have sex?1
I never said anything like that.
So, you do?
Why are you asking me now?
I’m an ethnographer. I ask everyone things, not just in interviews. You are here, too, no? So, you signed up for these ideas, too? Or are there tensions? ... You don’t need to translate this to her, I can interview you later if you are up for it.
The translator is provoked. For the sake of political-intellectual harmony, she had refrained from setting her boundaries, and this was the result. Do personal boundaries exist in ethnography anyway?
She is trying to outwit us with pseudo-intellectual manoeuvres. Just because she calls herself a researcher, does she get to penetrate all our personal space? I don’t mind these topics in principle. But who is she that I should share my private life with her, and in front of these comrades I just met yesterday? What do I do now? I’m not prepared for an intimate conversation with a dodgy stranger, not today. But if I tell her off, she will go ahead and write about how suppressed we all are ... No, no, I don’t trust her at all. She gave me police vibes from the start. She’ll get a diplomatic answer, that’s it.
Instead of saying the above, the translator bursts into a nervous giggle, which the researcher unimaginatively interprets as response to the taboos imposed on her. Nicely, she now has four anecdotes to choose from to introduce her hypothesis on embodied trauma and whatnot.
At this stage, the researcher is confused. She had been given the impression that she would be able to ask all her questions without reservation. But there is evidently a script, a non-state official narrative, and no matter how much she contextualises it, with empathy even, it is one that she must either endorse or challenge. The individuals she interacts with are like shapeshifters; they regularly update their identities, statuses, roles and levels of involvement — heck, even their names! She is walking on hot coals. With all these socio-political codes and mannerisms she is expected to follow, she doesn’t know anymore what to ask. There is something surreal about the situation. She has an almost erotic attraction to the worlds these women draw, but she knows she must protect herself from charms, to stay grounded in reality - in the reality that she knows and that her intended audience is anchored in.
She barely follows as the interlocutor takes a dive into the long history of patriarchy and the state, elaborating at length about the function of sexuality under capitalism.
Seriously, how am I supposed to make sense of these people? Some of them totally lack self-awareness. No way are they as coherent as they make it out to be. The men in my life back home fetishise them and the unrealistic standards they propagate, so that they can continue oppressing us. And then this passes as revolutionary femininity, and I am supposed to swallow everything they say or else I am a White liberal colonial feminist. Life is more complex than these make-believe worlds, and we should know this as feminists. I’m trying my best to write you into bodies of knowledge, and you are here acting like you are outside of history, an exception, an alien who doesn’t have a sex drive like everyone else, as if that’s a good thing. Give me a break!
She takes a leap.
I am not that interested in these collective narratives, you see. They are repetitive, and I can read them online. I want you to speak more honestly about your challenges. Surely, it’s not all that wonderful.
Who said that things are easy or perfect? Nobody knows our contradictions better than we do, and we address these internally. It seems that you came here with an agenda to detect all our issues and prove something when we never claimed to be flawless.
I’m not trying to catch anyone off guard. I’m just asking critical questions. This is what feminist research is about. If you value criticism and self-criticism, as you say you do, then you should appreciate my questions, no?
There is a fine line between research and intelligence gathering.2
Are you accusing me of something?
What do we know about you? How do we know what you will do with all this information? The West has a history of infiltrating and undermining movements through ‘research’.
You think that they send feminists on precarious university contracts to subvert political struggles? That’s quite a stretch!
That doesn’t matter. Intelligence services are always ahead of the curve. Basic special warfare. There are plenty of unwitting agents out there. Many are not even aware of the agendas they are part of.
This part of the conversation, of course, never happened. Instead, the researcher abandons her hopes of arresting the mystery she came here for. On a certain level, she feels hurt by the group’s inability to bond as humans. She tried her best to be compassionate and respectful. Even if she was not going to get to write up everything she witnessed, at least she wanted to understand. And that, for some reason, is not possible. She did, however, wonder why her subconscious produced such a dialogue about her research. She seems to have cracked the code of the extreme and repetitive discourse she has been exposed to. Or maybe it’s her funding source.
Meanwhile, the interviewee has flashbacks. Her palms are sweaty. Anxiety, growling in her bowels.
Run, rush, live as quickly as possible.
Shots in Paris, drones in Kobanê, another assassination.
What am I doing here? Who is this person in front of me? Why is she asking this?
Have I revealed too much? Was I too reserved?
Will I live to know what she says about me?
Every sentence must do justice to our martyrs. At our most perfect selves we honour their sacrifices.
I’m very tired. In the communal struggle, there is no Room of One’s Own.
Soon, a mild sense of panic creeps in. For everyone involved, albeit for different reasons, it is essential to end on a friendly note. During tea break, conversations continue.
I don’t know why we keep giving interviews. These people portray themselves as objective, free from influences. They come here to prove the supremacy of their ideologies and lifestyles, and they are not honest about it. I would take their scepticism seriously if I knew they paid attention to social struggles on their doorsteps. Even their best have minds colonised by liberalism. They see the world burning, and they know they must act, but they first need to prove that being radical is not the way to go, that revolution is utopia. That’s what is happening. If it isn’t their states that send them here, that is!
I really don’t think it’s that deep. She is quite inexperienced; I think she was genuinely intrigued by all the media images and wants to understand what’s happening here. Her writing is not too bad, quite empathetic actually. The kind of writing we used to dream of. Besides, she has a point about the contradictions ... It’s good to have external critical engagement.
Sure, but for that you need philosophical depth - so don’t say that too much in front of her. And aren’t the interviews enough? I’d rather not have her see everything. I mean, damn, we can’t even offer tea when the male comrades visit without feeling observed and wondering how she will interpret every move.
You see, in ethnography — I know this from my time at uni — they stress the role of the so-called ‘everyday’. So even a coincidence or anecdote can become a powerful, meaningful metaphor if you pull it off in the right way. There is value in that, but it comes at the cost of material analysis. I know an anthropologist, who managed to stretch one ten-minute conversation with two people she just met into three book chapters.
I mean, we do value theorising from life, but not in this robotic fashion, without historical and political awareness of colonialism and power. No wonder they are so clueless about the real world. Anyway, make sure to get her contact details. Maybe she can help us with things in the future.
The translator gives the researcher her phone back.
You would be a great research assistant. You know so much about the context, and you know how to engage westerners. You are different, you know. You have potential - if you know what I mean.
I’m actually involved in the work here, we do research, too, but our approach and perspectives are different from the dominant system. We try to...
I know. Take my card anyway. I’m part of a decolonial feminisms research cluster. Think about it. Some critical distance will be good for you. You guys need to engage the world ifyou want recognition.
Tired, the translator quietly disappears, to go for a smoke. Meanwhile, the other two remember that they need to log this encounter for their own respective purposes.
Let’s
take
a photo.
Loooong live the women’s struggle!
Six months later, the interviewee dies in an airstrike. The researcher gets a permanent contract. The translator struggles with finances and mental health and remembers the card. And then the martyrs. And then, again, the card. Then the martyrs again.
*
This chapter is dedicated to two Kurdish revolutionaries, Gulan (Eylem Kaplan) and Zilan (Nagihan Akarsel), whom I got to spend time with during my research. The perspectives — developed inside war, amid bombardments — that they shared with me on the need for liberationist knowledge production outside of mainstream institutions had a great impact on me. Gulan was killed in combat in 2016, a year after I interviewed her. Zilan was assassinated in 2022, by an agent of the Turkish intelligence, in front of her home in Silêmanî, where she was building up what is now the Kurdish Women’s Library, Archive and Research Center.
This question was actually posed to the author by a well-known Western feminist in a recorded public event.
2 This is not an exaggeration for dramatic effect.