Sophie was an exchange student at Sabancı University. In her oral history project with "Elif" who was an exchange student at Sabancı University from Germany, Sophie explores reflections on identity and belonging in Elif's life.
Sophie: “I feel that my position, style of questioning and relationship with my interviewee is what made the oral history project and the process of the interview the most interesting and in depth, but also the most problematic. I feel my position of being friends with the informant meant that on my part there was an element of performance, especially in the first interview. This performance I felt necessary for the purposes of the recorder, the knowledge that the interview was recorded, and the recording is to be part of an archive that will be listened to again by those who don’t know Elif or myself meant that I entered and conducted the interview with a ‘selective memory’.”
“My main motivation to conduct a second interview was first of all in regard to the content of the first. The topic of being a Turk in Germany was one I had been very interested in exploring as part of Elif’s narrative and one that we had discussed at length in the first interview. However, upon reviewing it in the transcription process I felt I had framed the interview and its questions in a way that directed my interviewee to discuss her story in relation to this frame.”
“Conducting a second interview also provided an opportunity for me to address the issues I had discovered in my interviewing style during the transcription process. I wanted to phrase my questions more openly, I realised that I tended to phrase a question and then add further points or alternatives that specified the question too much, rather than allowing her to interpret it herself.”
From the interview:
“We are like one of the Turks who can really talk in German and speak in German and very well actually, so um they also like us, like they wish that every Turk would be like this.”
“My dad started working there and he liked Germany…my mum before she married she was like, ‘I don’t care what we’ll be doing here, but I know I will live in Germany’, and she wanted us to grow up there which I can understand because she grew up in both sides and she knew like the challenges of both and the opportunities of both sides and I am very glad she did.”
In this project, the interviewee preferred to remain anonymous.