Following the earthquakes in Türkiye on 6 February 2023, survivors continued their daily lives in tent cities, which emerged as a new heterotopic space where the boundaries between public and private spheres became intertwined. The transition from one’s own ‘castle’ to a communal living space filled with uncertainties has heightened the visibility of differences and the presence of ‘others’. The local people have perceived tent cities as unsafe areas of struggle occupied by those ‘others’. In this study we focus on the emotional dimensions through which the concept of otherness, a discourse area aimed at separation, is constructed in tent cities. We draw on Sara Ahmed’s exploration of the emotional nature of the public sphere and Michel Foucault’s concepts of hegemony and heterotopia to analyse data obtained from interviews with earthquake survivors in Malatya. In our research we adopt a critical discourse analysis approach to investigate how emotion-led discourses construct being other, how subjects make sense of who they are, and the conflicting positions and areas of conflict in which subjects remain. Our findings indicate that the earthquake has exacerbated the dimension of ‘othering’ between locals and non-locals, despite their shared experience of crisis.