Crossing Liminal Spaces: Greek Cypriot Teenagers' Political Socialization in Turkish Language Classes

• In Event: Language and Liminality in the Schooling of Nondominant and Immigrant Youth

Abstract

Focusing on the Cypriot conflict-affected context, this paper looks at how Greek-Cypriot teenagers debated identity positionings and engaged with political and conflict ideologies usually seen as part of the ‘adult world’. In order to do so it draws on data from two linguistic ethnographic projects (2006-2009; 2012-2015) which analyzed classroom observations and recordings of Turkish MFL language lessons.

Approaching age and childhood as socio-cultural constructs, childhood studies scholars are increasingly criticizing views of children as ‘not-complete’ or ‘non-yet-adults’, acknowledging children instead as “resourceful active social agents in their own right” (Kaukko & Wenesjo, 2017:10; Raby 2016). At the same time, children are often seen as “liminal subjects” with ontological differences in comparisons to adults (Wells, 2017: 215). In general, the anthropological concept of liminality has traditionally been linked with ‘transition’ and ‘threshold’ – to use Turner’s words “the midpoint of transition in a status-sequence between two positions” (1974:237) – and has been often used to theorize the space occupied by youth which can blend the binary between ‘childhood/youth’ and adulthood.

Beyond that, the concept of liminality has been also used in many different ways, often to describe a space of in-between, where normal rules and conventions and relations are suspended or transgressed, and which carry the potential to lead to the creation of new structures, hybridity and creative performance. Still, as Rampton (1999) points out, it may also worth looking “inside the borderlands inside liminality” for alternative or enduring patterns and conventions.
Following Rampton’s call and approaching children as youthful political agents this paper analyses an interactional event, when the usual lesson structures and procedures were suspended, looking at how adolescents mobilized knowledge and recourses to form and debate political subjectivities. The youth in this study can be seen as inhabiting multiple liminal social and political spaces. Firstly, they were in their last year(s) of schooling and adolescence, soon to be considered legally ‘adults’ as well as citizens with voting rights. Second, the Turkish-language lesson itself can be seen as occupying a liminal space in the school. Launched in 2003 in a midst of sociopolitical changes in the conflict-affect Cyprus Republic, Turkish (the language of the ‘traditional enemy’) MFL classes marked a transition towards an alternative reconciliatory political discourse, though the rest of the curriculum and education discourses remained unchanged. This resulted in the students and teachers needing to deal with precarity and accusations of ‘treason’. Thirdly, the extracts analyzed here, took place at moments when the normal interaction order of a typical lesson were suspended: the researcher had taken over the lesson, turn-taking rules changed, and the interaction was framed as a social/political discussion for research purposes rather than a pedagogic one.

The analysis points to the resilience of conflict discourses and discourses of othering but it also reveals youngsters’ attempts to articulate a political discourse that introduces new discursive frames for the discussion social and political relations in a post-conflict manner. This has important implications for young people’s political socialization in a conflict-affected context.

Author

• Constadina Charalambous, European University Cyprus