This special issue explores the social history of families from Turkey who have settled in Europe across more than eighty years of migration and transformation. Rather than treating migrant families as passive objects of policy, it presents them as active agents who navigate migration, reshape internal relations of authority, build networks, and transmit family memory across generations. Its historical scope extends from the annexation of Antakya in 1939 through the guest-worker programmes of the 1960s and family reunification to the contemporary ‘New Wave’ of highly skilled migration and ‘uneasiness migration.’ Drawing on oral history, ethnographic fieldwork, comparative film analysis, biographical research, family-based autoethnography, and digital content analysis, the contributions address institutional discrimination, emotional regimes, integration, homemaking, precarity, and the production of ‘migrant family capital’ on digital platforms. They also broaden the geographical focus beyond the conventional emphasis on Germany and other major Western European destinations. The issue also attends to the changing meanings of home, belonging, and intergenerational memory. Together, the articles bring an interdisciplinary perspective to Philip L. Martin’s ‘unfinished story’ of migration and show that the history of families from Turkey is not a temporary episode confined to the past, but an ongoing and dynamic part of the broader history of the family in Europe.
Arpacı et al. (Sun,) studied this question.