Interviews, 2018

Scope and content:

For the Spring 2018 AMES 320S: Refugee Lives class, students worked in groups of two and three to carry out oral history interviews with refugees from Syria and Iraq. The Syrian refugees were residing in Erbil (Iraq), Greece, and Germany, and the Iraqi refugee was currently residing in Turkey. Interviews were conducted by Skype and recorded on wav files. Two interviews of approximately one hour duration were recorded over the semesters with each refugee. Interviews were in English, and students transcribed the audio and wrote fieldnotes. Two of the interviewees wished to be known by their first name only (Mahmoud) or by an initial (T). The interviews were open-ended and relationship-based, with the refugee directing the conversation if they chose to. Students avoided topics that the refugee wanted to avoid, such as T not wanting to share her story of why she had to leave Iraq. The public-facing edited versions (approximately four minutes each) of the interviews were posted on Duke Service-Learning's Arabic Communities website.

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