Navigating liminality: young people’s political socialization in a conflict-affected context
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Constadina Charalambous
Abstract
This paper focuses on political socialization in a conflict-affected context and looks at how young Greek-Cypriot learners of Turkish debated political positionings and engaged with political and conflict ideologies usually seen as part of the adult world. It draws on data from two linguistic ethnographic projects (2006–2009; 2012–2015) that analysed classroom observations and recordings of controversial Turkish-as-Foreign-Language (MFL) lessons in a Greek-Cypriot Secondary School. The paper employs the concept of liminality, which has been traditionally linked with transition, describing an in-between space, where normal rules, conventions and relations are suspended or transgressed, carrying the potential for the creation of new structures and creative performance. Moving away from romantised approaches to liminality as liberating from structures, the analysis looks “inside liminality” for alternative or enduring patterns and conventions and reveals the affordances and limitations of liminal-like experiences in education settings, and their potential role in young people’s political socialization. Approaching children/teenagers as youthful political agents, the paper analyses first the multiple liminal social and political spaces that young learners of Turkish occupied; then, it focuses particularly on an interactional event, when the usual lesson structures and procedures of the language lesson were suspended, looking at how students, in this liminal-like moment, mobilized knowledge and recourses to form and debate political subjectivities and dominant political ideologies. 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 of social and political relations in a post-conflict manner. This has important implications for young people’s political socialization in conflict-affected contexts, revealing the role that language plays in this process.
Funding source: Leverhulme Trust
Award Identifier / Grant number: RPG-2012-447
Appendix 1: Transcription conventions
| [ | |
| [ | text overlaps |
| (.) | pause less than a second |
| (…) | Text omitted |
| (number) | number indicates seconds of pause |
| … | the vowel of the last syllable is elongated and extended until the next word (used in the English translation) |
| ((italics)) | Comments |
| { text } | words that are necessary for the translated text to make sense |
| - | interrupted speech |
| = | no pause between turns |
| underlined | emphasised words |
| CAPITALS | Words pronounced louder and with emphasis |
| ‘text’ | Text pronounced as quoting someone else (usually marked as such by a change in the pitch of the voice) |
| ( ) | inaudible word |
| (student) | Unidentified student |
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- New horizons in the study of language and liminality: an introduction
- “Miss, our clothes are clean:” contesting liminality in Lebanese kindergarten classrooms
- Stewards of the language: liminality and transnational sovereignty
- Linguistic ethnography and immigrant youth’s social lives in the liminal interludes of schooling
- Angolan children’s experiences in residential centers: displacement, liminality, and belonging
- Navigating liminality: young people’s political socialization in a conflict-affected context
- Thresholds of liminality: discourse and embodiment from separation to consummation among Guatemalan Maya youth workers in Los Angeles
- Beyond Policías y ladrones: an epilogue to liminality?
- Book Review
- Hillewaert, Sarah: Morality at the Margins: Youth, Language, and Islam in Coastal Kenya
- Varia
- Assessing the vitality of Gombe dialect of Fulfulde: a multi-scale approach
- “We have that strong R, you know”: the enregisterment of a distinctive use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- New horizons in the study of language and liminality: an introduction
- “Miss, our clothes are clean:” contesting liminality in Lebanese kindergarten classrooms
- Stewards of the language: liminality and transnational sovereignty
- Linguistic ethnography and immigrant youth’s social lives in the liminal interludes of schooling
- Angolan children’s experiences in residential centers: displacement, liminality, and belonging
- Navigating liminality: young people’s political socialization in a conflict-affected context
- Thresholds of liminality: discourse and embodiment from separation to consummation among Guatemalan Maya youth workers in Los Angeles
- Beyond Policías y ladrones: an epilogue to liminality?
- Book Review
- Hillewaert, Sarah: Morality at the Margins: Youth, Language, and Islam in Coastal Kenya
- Varia
- Assessing the vitality of Gombe dialect of Fulfulde: a multi-scale approach
- “We have that strong R, you know”: the enregisterment of a distinctive use of rhotics in Santomean Portuguese
