Education and the Politics of Cultural Survival for Uyghur Immigrants in Turkey

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges of language and cultural maintenance through education among one immigrant ethnic group, the Uyghurs within Turkey, where the Uyghur population has grown in recent years. Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic minority group of some 10 million people within China, originating from China’s northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Data for the paper are based on ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul, where the Uyghur population in Turkey is the largest. The paper illustrates how the local and global environment impact how culture is constructed, and that identity construction and language maintenance projects are not ideologically neutral. It contributes to the understudied link between language, ethnicity, politics, and education by exploring the ways in which the Uyghur community in Istanbul uses non-formal education to maintain and transmit their language and cultural traditions in their host environment.

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