Armenian schools in contemporary Turkey: Governmentality, community, resilience

In the grip of central examination systems, the marketization and pri-vatization of schooling, regulations of a nation state which maintains its emphasis on its Turko-Islamic tenets, and the escalation of competition among students as an outcome of an endeavor to be incorporated into global job markets, the Armenian schools struggle to breed a nurturing soil for Armenian cultural sustainability. The main objective of this re-search is to analyze to what extent the Armenian schools serve as plac-es of cultural empowerment in spite of the external constraints that the educational system in Turkey breeds and the political targeting Armenian community experiences today. Although the schools are places of acculturation in which the wishes of the nation state almost always prevail, this does not mean that latitude in education is fully en-compassed by precepts of national education. There is a possibility for the schools to function as spaces for cultural self-realization as opposed to the political targeting and marginalization they are subjected to. The aim of this study is to unpack the broader educational field encapsulat-ing the Armenian schools, and to paint a comprehensive picture which summarizes bureaucratic functioning, quotidian practices, daily predic-aments, the network of relationships interwoven around the schools or any pattern that delineate their overall milieu, so that it could be possi-ble to understand how self-meaning is produced in the schools.