Making of community in the margin: the case of Okmeydanı

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand the experience of living in the margin in Turkey through the accounts of the inhabitants of one of marginal districts, Okmeydanı. To achive this purpose, this work focuses on a community in Okmeydanı, whose members identify themselves the local people of Okmeydanı. Taking the shared understanding of the members of this community as the point of departure, this thesis analyzes the making of community in the margin and scrutinizes two common issues in the narratives of the local people of Okmeydanı: public representations and degeneration. In this direction, first of all, how the local people appropriate, renounce and reproduce the representations of marginal districts within different public spheres is examined. At the end of this part, it is concluded that the marginality and normality constantly produce each other and the marginalized learn how to marginalize others to imagine their own community and their own norms. Then the other common issue, namely degeneration, is subjected to an analysis focusing on the transformation of built life in the district. This part of the thesis examines how the local people narrate the transformation and what kind of function this narrative structure operates. By analyzing what kind of themes can find a place and what kind of themes cannot in the narratives of degeneration, this part of the thesis concludes that the sense of belonging to Okmeydanı and to the imagined community of its local people is produced to stage political demands within the discursive frame allowed by neoliberalism. The study comes to an end by a critical remark that speaking of marginality and imagining alternative politics requires a reflection on the ways of speaking against hegemonic understanding in order to avoid reproducing the hegemonic language.