Suchergebnisse

Through an ethnographic study of schooling in the Republic of Tatarstan, this book explores how competing notions of nationhood and belonging are constructed, articulated and negotiated within educational spaces. Amidst major political and ideological moves toward centralization in Russia under the Putin presidency, this small provincial town in Tatarstan provides a unique case of local attempts to promote and preserve minority languages and cultures through education and schooling. Ultimately, the study reveals that while schooling can be an effective instrument of the state to transform individuals as well as society as a whole, school also encompasses various spaces where the agency of local actors unfolds and official messages are contested. Looking at what happens inside schools and beyond—in classrooms, hallways and playgrounds to private households or local Islamic schools—Dilyara Suleymanova here offers a detailed ethnographic account of the way centrally devised educational policies are being received, negotiated and contested on the ground.

What does it mean for the second-generation youth to grow up with the political legacies of their origin country, particularly with its violent past in the context of diaspora? In which ways young people engage with war/conflict-related migration experiences of their parents and what consequences these have on their (post-)migrant lives? Careful reading of life-stories of young people of Bosnian and Kurdish/-Alevi background, born and raised in Switzerland, complemented by ethnographic observations in diasporic spaces, reveals how political past (and present) of the origin country is integrated, reinterpreted and negotiated in the context of own biography and dealt with in everyday life. The analysis demonstrates in which spaces and situations young people are confronted with and negotiate their belonging to the origin country and its problematic past and how differently connection to the origin country can be established. These personal ways of dealing with the past (and present) have effects on various contexts of young people's lives such as their engagement in diasporic structures or their everyday interpersonal relations. In this context, the paper will also try to critically engage with the concepts such as "second generation", "diaspora" and "homeland".

The article analyzes unfoldings and enactments of narratives on a politically divisive past in educational spaces of two multi-ethnic settings – the Republic of Tatarstan and Bosnia and Herzegovina. We explore how the contested past is represented within official school curricula and how it unfolds in concrete school settings. In each case we have a historic event that is a politically divisive and contentious issue. Though one of these historical events lies far back in history (1552) and the other is more recent (1992–1995), in both cases the contested past is being silenced in the official history curricula. The paper is guided by the following question: in what ways does a past that is muted within a history curriculum continue to speak and structure the relationships of the school present? In order to answer this question, we situate our work within the literature on ethnographies of education, as well as the relatively new but burgeoning field of inquiry on emotional geographies and anthropologies of education. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in these two settings, we argue that the narratives on the violent past form and divide national communities not only through divergent views and interpretations of the historic event by the groups involved but also through strong emotional attachments to these narratives. We conclude by calling for a sustained engagement with emotions in educational settings as sites of embodiment that work to negotiate and actively rework top-down educational narratives, especially when considering the processes of identity-building through school spaces.

This volume contends that young individuals across Europe relate to their country's history in complex and often ambivalent ways. It pays attention to how both formal education and broader culture communicate ideas about the past, and how young people respond to these ideas. The studies collected in this volume show that such ideas about the past are central to the formation of the group identities of nations, social movements, or religious groups. Young people express received historical narratives in new, potentially subversive, ways. As young people tend to be more mobile and ready to interrogate their own roots than later generations, they selectively privilege certain aspects of their identities and their identification with their family or nation while neglecting others. This collection aims to correct the popular misperception that young people are indifferent towards history and prove instead that historical narratives are constitutive to their individual identities and their sense of belonging to something broader than themselves