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With its imperial past, nationalist tradition, past westernization attempts, inverse orientalism toward populations from the East, and current neo-Ottomanist policies, Turkey presents an interesting case in which to examine the ideologies underlying its education system. Turkish schools began receiving a large number of Syrian refugees following the outbreak of the Syrian War in 2011. How does Turkey seek to absorb these former subjects of the Ottoman empire politically, discursively, and socioculturally into its national body politic, and more specifically into the education system, in light of shifting relations with Arabs and changing representation of the Arabic language and culture? Based on literature review and interviews with Syrians, state officials, and NGO representatives in Istanbul between 2017 and 2020, this study demonstrates that while there is strong emphasis on shared religious and cultural ties, Syrians are still expected to assimilate, similar to other historically minoritized populations in Turkey, albeit with some peculiarities. These peculiarities stem from increased prominence of the Arabic language through the Islamization project of the present government, international funding for the accommodation of refugees, and the economic relations the government seeks with Arab countries.

This paper sheds light on Syrian refugee women's negotiation strategies in language learning classrooms and in their broader social contexts from an intersectional perspective. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups complemented by participatory observation in language classes, we use a post-structuralist approach to examine gendered language socialization. Our research combines an intersectional framework and a Bourdieusian perspective on symbolic capital to show how women perform gender and negotiate their roles in classrooms, within families and vis-à-vis the host society. The findings demonstrate that being a woman and a migrant presents particular challenges in learning language. At the same time, learning language allows for the re-negotiation of gender relations and power dynamics. We find that gender structures women's access to linguistic resources and interactional opportunities as they perform language under social pressure to conform to prescribed roles as mothers, wives and virtuous, and shy women. Yet, these roles are not static: gender roles are also reconstituted in the process of language learning and gaining symbolic capital.

This article examines social relations for Syrian women in Istanbul by focusing on micro-level lived relationships of hospitality. Through an ethnographic, qualitative approach to key sites of encounter, the article explores how migrants navigate a public milieu in which hospitality has partially been taken away from the local community's moral oversight in a context of a national political discourse on hospitality. We also analyze 'hosting' and 'guesting' as mutually negotiated and contested practices. This study highlights the agency and resistance strategies of Syrian women to their 'differential inclusion' into Turkish society. It examines how they navigate (in)hospitality and also unpacks the use of virtuous dimensions of hospitality (1) to reverse discriminatory ethnic and class discourses and renegotiate subjectivities that are imposed upon them as 'guests'; (2) to bring forward perceived cultural similarities between Syria and Turkey; and (3) to revalorize their roles and status in their families. The contribution of this study is to focus on hospitality as a means of theorizing how women navigate complex and conflicting, familiar and yet also new, social ecologies as they make themselves at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]