The cultural politics of school relocations: an ethnographic study of an Istanbul neighbourhood school

ABSTRACT

In Turkey, the social and economic changes of the past couple of decades have facilitated a neoliberal reconstruction of the city and a concomitant reorganisation of its educational spaces. The interaction between the urban space economy and school spaces has been documented by various studies, most of which point to the interplay between education policies and the racialised restructuring of urban spaces. In Turkey, this process has been particularly convoluted, perhaps more so than anywhere else. With reference to a particular school relocation/closing case, this article examines how school relocations induced by urban transformation have interacted with the desecularisation of the education system in Turkey. By drawing on the responses of a specific neighbourhood to the relocation of their school, I argue that school relocations are inextricably linked to the material and symbolic reorganisation of neighbourhoods and lead to the destabilisation of secular middle class neighbourhoods and their schools. And by showing how neoliberalisation interacts with inherited regulatory systems, through this research article I aim to contribute to the existing literature on the interaction between education policy and urban space.

KEYWORDS:

• education policy
• middle class
• neoliberalism
• secularism
• urban restructuring

Notes

1. According to Article 51 of the National Education Basic Act. No. 1739, public school buildings are to be planned and built by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE), and the contribution of citizens is also promoted. For this reason they are considered as public good, which makes it more difficult for policy makers to legitimise selling the schools although that has recently been legalised. In 2003, the title of Article 51, which had referred to ‘school buildings’, was changed to ‘school buildings and immovable items’, which suggests that school buildings were seen until recently as being inseparable from the land on which they were situated; hence it can be seen that the legal basis of today’s school relocation policy was initiated in 2003.

2. These are Anatolian (college preparation), vocational and Imam Hatip high schools. In addition to these three common types, there are there are six science high schools and three social sciences high schools in Istanbul.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sezen Bayhan

Sezen Bayhan is an instructor in the School of Foreign Languages at Istanbul Technical University and a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Studies at Bogaziçi University.