Views from the Varzharan: Negotiation of social identities through Armenian schools

Armenians in Turkey are an officially recognized minority group; however, they are unofficially (self-)regarded as 'semi-citizens' due to religious and linguistic differences from the majority of the population. There exist imagined boundaries between private Armenian and public Turkish spaces. There also exist institutions and members that occupy strategic positions 'between' them. Armenian schools and students represent one such case study. While the schools hold distinct spatial positions under the private/public binary, its students navigate complicated socio-spatial positions. This thesis argued that Armenian students negotiate their identities differently based on their socio-spatial positions, and these differences could be measured through their language attitudes and practices within the Armenian school. Ethnographic data was collected through semi-structured interviews and participant observations at one Armenian high school in Istanbul. The main themes represented the Armenian school as a private, community-centered 'safe space' and 'second home', and Armenian students as holding variant socio-spatial identities. I discussed the school's mechanisms of symbolic power that promote a socialized habitus, as well as the students' (in)consistent language attitudes and practices that presented themselves as paradoxes in their complicated negotiations of social identity within these conditions.