390 - TRACING THE LANDSCAPE IN THE PSYCHE ACROSS JOURNEYS OF IMMIGRATION AND BELONGING

Session: D04S013 - Social & Cultural Processes
AUTHORS:
Sullu Bengi (Medgar Evers College, CUNY ~ New York City ~ United States of America)
Abstract text:
While environmental psychological research brought attention to how places and landscapes are integral to essential psychological processes such as identity development and belonging (Prohansky et. al, 1983), specific pathways through which places and landscapes are internalized within the human psyche remain less clear (Sullu, 2024). This research will employ the Listening Guide method (Tolman and Head 2021), a qualitative psychological method, to conduct and analyze interviews with immigrants from Turkey who resettled in developed countries, to trace and understand how memories of and attachment to places, a sense of belonging enacted through specific places, and various socio-economic and political processes of disruption of attachment to places shape interviewees' immigration journeys. In Turkey, out of the young people who are 15-29 years old, 25.9% of them are NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) (Oner, 2025), with 29.8% of these young people college graduates. Since the late 2010s, the political crisis of democratic governance coupled with the harsh decline in economic conditions and spiking inflation as well as decline of cultural opportunities in Turkey led young people to leave Turkey earlier in life and increasingly for good. In the light of and in addition to the economic, social and cultural implications of the immigration journey, there is a psycho-spatial layer that is underanalyzed. The project hopes to bridge psychological science with environmental and immigration studies, paving the way for offering practical insights to foster belonging and inclusion by addressing complex, non-linear emotional and cognitive processes.