A country in a school: FAJR Iranian school in Turkey

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2482911 _(Table of Contents)

The Fajr Iranian School has been located in Sultanahmet, in the center of Istanbul, for more than one hundred years, and it has operated as a foreign school continuously since 1882, providing education for the Iranian community in Istanbul. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, the Fajr Iranian School has become affiliated with the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) in Turkey. This special position of the school, as a government-run school of the Iranian regime located in a foreign country, implies the significance of this school’s spatial setting. This thesis is an ethnographic exploration into this spatiality. After presenting a brief history of this educational institution and the Iranian community in Turkey, this thesis argues that the spatial setting of the Fajr Iranian School, examined as an ideological state apparatus that creates a state-centered habitus, plays a significant role in constructing social identities of the Iranian students in Turkey. Furthermore, it shows that these students negotiate their identities differently based on their selfpositionings, which are examined through their collective and personal negotiations. On the one hand, the Fajr Iranian School plays a vital role in creating a ‘safe’ and ‘private’ space for its students to learn and maintain the culture, history and language around being Iranian in Turkey; on the other hand, it also constitutes a site of struggle due to being a ’closed place’ where the symbolic power of the state is differently exercised over its agents as the school aims to exert a dominant Iranian identity. Collective negotiations represent how the students negotiate their identities through a collective group lens. Personal negotiations, however, somehow as counter examples against the image of group identity, prove to be valuable to analyze that there are different positionings of some students in their interpersonal relations within this state-centered habitus. In this way, the thesis shows that, symbolic capitals and levels of symbolic power are prone to shifts for particular groups in the school space.