The Project

“Undaunted Voices of Turkey: Stories of women who resist” was initiated in May 2017. Since then, we reached out to over 30 women and interviewed them. As of now, we have 25 audios recorded in broadcast quality and still continue to interview women who are willing to share their stories with us.

Training

As we are a team of volunteers from diverse backgrounds, we were meticulous in the quality and reliability of the project. Since May 2017, in addition to self-training, we joined various workshops on how to conduct an interview, use digital technology and utilize storytelling. We also received consulting from a therapist on how to approach the interviewees who could be emotionally sensitive.

Data Collection

The interviewees were either from our own networks, i.e. we knew them in person, or we found them from our immediate contacts. We also verified the interviewees with at least two other people. However, given that most of the interviewees were either in Turkey or fled from Turkey and were seeking asylum in other countries, we did not share their identities for safety concerns. For some stories, we even avoided mentioning the city/country names and other locations that could make it easy to reveal their identities.

We were rigorous to make sure that the interviews were representative of all women with different occupations and a wide range of ages as well as being from different geographies of Turkey and represent diverse ethnicities.

Processing

Before every interview, the team member introduced the project and the prospective plans to the interviewee in detail and recorded the interview if and only if she gave consent to record her voice. All interviews have been transcribed and later translated into English given that they were done in Turkish. All stories were indexed with keywords and categorized based on their themes.

We believe every story is a piece of oral history, for this reason, we never manipulated the stories for either aesthetic or literary purposes. Every interviewee had her own unique story and we aimed to transfer those experiences as truly as possible. To do so, the translation of the story was checked and verified by two team members to make sure that it matches with the original content, only then it was sent for proof-reading by a native English speaker.

In addition to the team members, we also worked with numerous external volunteers who were extremely ambitious in improving the project. Our external collaborators included transcribers, translators, proof-readers and voice artists, all of whom accepted to sign the confidentiality agreement for this project.