"You wake up each day with four stranger kids": An ethnographic research with children living in children's homes

There are many protection and care models for disadvantaged children in Turkey. One model is called "children's homes," in which five to six children separated by their age and gender stay together with three care workers who do shifts of twenty-four hours. This research is parallel to the ideas and theories of the New Sociology of Childhood and tries to understand the experiences and cultural politics of childhood with regard to children living in children's homes in Turkey. The research combines three qualitative research methodologies, in-depth interviews, focus group interviews, and participant observation, to understand children's views and how they position themselves and perform their subjectivity in the face of discourses that reproduce the cultural politics and the practices of their daily lives. Keywords: Children's Homes, Cultural Politics of Childhood, Embodied Space, New Sociology of Childhood, Stigma.