I am a cultural anthropologist interested in the state, competing nationalisms, transnationalism and migration, asylum seeking, and identity within the contexts of Turkey and the United States. My dissertation, “Challenging Narratives: Kurdish Young Adults in Istanbul and Chicago,” explores an interplay between youthful agency and state imposition. It addresses ways in which young adults who have migrated within one state and to another are challenging dominant ethno-nationalist state narratives that seek to erase and silence them, as well as narratives of asylum seeking that rely on tropes of victimhood that do not reflect their lived experiences. In challenging these narratives, my interlocutors make emphatic claims to their Kurdishness and strive for increased visibility.