Haunting pasts, broken futures: youth subjectivities under the conditions of violence and precarity

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1628608 (Table of Contents)

This thesis investigates the formation of youth subjectivities in the upper part of Okmeydanı district, populated by Alevi-Kurdish families, and in which many revolutinoary groups are active. I focused upon the narratives and self-representations of Alevi-Kurdish youth to examine their understandings of political violence, discriminations, and precarious conditions based on both local issues and common economic and social problems in the neoliberal era. In the histoy of Okmeydanı, violence and political struggle has constituted an affective framework for youth subjectivities, and the image of political/‘rebellious’youth has been associated with the space of Okmeydanı. Yet, I discussed in this thesis how urban youth in Okmeydanı also develops different subjectivities beyond and within political realms to make sense of their social worlds; and their subjectivities reframes and requestion collective memory, political struggle and local codes and identities in the light of new possibilities, rather than direct appropriation of past and local structures into their lives. In this sense, I argue that Okmeydanlı youth experince oscillations between affective discourse of the space shaped by violence, resistance and ‘heroic’ actions in the political realm, and different temporal adjustments in their lives to reconcile the emotional belonging to the space with the need and desire for new opportunities.