Kurdish students’ perceptions of stigma and their destigmatization strategies in urban contexts in Turkey

Abstract

Contemporary literature has chiefly studied the Kurdish issue from a macro-political perspective. In this paper, we focus on ordinary Kurdish youth’s everyday responses to stigma and discrimination from the majority Turkish group and connect them to the macro-political context. Drawing on 29 qualitative in-depth interviews with Kurdish students in Izmir, we document that this group seeks to negotiate their belonging in the face of their characterizations as backward, terrorist, and disloyal. The findings suggest that these youth respond to stigmas, depending on contextual dynamics, by specific destigmatization strategies such as confronting, managing the self, assuming individual responsibility, and avoiding. We argue that ongoing armed conflict stigmatizes Kurds as separatists, and invisible markers between Kurds and Turks make hiding ethnicity the primary destigmatization strategy for Kurds.