CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Cankurt, Ilkin |
|---|---|
| Title | The Limits of Roma Upward Mobility: Urban Agency in the Tuzcu Neighborhood of Izmir, Turkey |
| Summary | This thesis focuses on the constraints and contingencies to upward mobility of Roma in the spatially segregated neighborhood of Tuzcu in Izmir, Turkey. Based on five-month-long ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis shows the spatial dynamics in the neighborhood, where economic change and urban transformation limit career paths and residential mobility. Furthermore, this thesis reveals the effect of neighborhood on habitual dispositions of Tuzcu residents such as language incompetency, taste and gestures which are visible stigma signs of Tuzcu Roma. These aspects crystallize in the accessibility of forms of capital and induces economic poverty and stigmatization that reproduce their position in social space. Within this frame, I firstly explore tactics of Tuzcu Roma concerning poverty, stigmatization and the neighborhood effect. several tactics navigating the infrastructure of the neighborhood and the Turkish welfare system with the purpose of income generation. Other agentic processes include creating social and spatial distance . Regarding stigmatization as the outcome of Tuzcu Roma habitus, I scrutinize impression management of Roma by drawing on Goffmanian passing and covering strategies. Passing through covering emerges as the main strategy both among socially mobile and immobile Tuzcu Roma. When they draw on only iterational elements of stigmatized habitual dispositions, strategies are not successful. On the other hand, effective passing strategies through covering stem from cleft habitus of Tuzcu Roma which make use of projective and practical-evaluative element of the agentic dimension. Therefore, the achieved individual upward mobility does not transform the macro structure. |
| Supervisor | Monterescu, Daniel, Alexandra Kowalski |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/cankurt_ilkin.pdf |
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