Fighting racism in Turkey

Kurdish homeownership as an anti-racist practice

Bibliographic Data

ID2148221
AuthorsGullistan Yarkin (Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton, New York, USA), Güllistan Yarkın (Binghamton University, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume43
Issue15
Pages2705-2723
Publication date2020-12-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnic and Racial Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-9870 • E-ISSN: 1466-4356
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01419870.2019.1685116
OpenAlexW2988707916
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited13

This article focuses on the housing experiences of Kurdish migrants/working classes in a Turkish-dominated working-class district of Zeytinburnu in Istanbul since the 1990s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article argues that Kurds experienced housing discrimination predominantly in the forms of refusal of tenancy and the threat of removal from their homes by their Turkish neighbours and landlords. To struggle against this form of racism, they developed homeownership as a form of everyday anti-racist practice. For them, owned home rather than rented home emerged as a space of resistance where they can restore their dignity and integrity in a place polluted by racialized power relations with a long colonial history. The article also argues that the reproduction of the space in the form of apartmentalization since the 1980s and the crisis of the housing industry in the 2000s played important roles in Kurds' development of homeownership as an anti-racist practice

Business · Criminology · Dignity · Ethnography · Housing estate · Leasehold estate · Political economy · Political science · Power (physics · Racism · Resistance (ecology · Securitization · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Turkish · Anthropology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Turkey's Politics and Society