scholarly journals “Take Me Back to My Homeland Dead or Alive!”: The Myth of Return Among London’s Turkish-Speaking Community

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Cakmak

In classical diaspora literature, the “myth of return” has major significance. It is believed that the “myth of return” is embedded in the minds of immigrants from their arrival. This paper examines post-migration mobilities of the Turkish-speaking community in North London as well as the shift in narratives of homeland among diaspora communities; from the “myth of return” to ritual-like visits or mundane pilgrimages. My ethnographic study analyses the post-migration homeland visiting patterns of the Turkish-speaking community into four categories. I discuss how narratives of episodic homeland visits and the desire to be buried in the homeland have replaced the myth of return.

Pragmatics ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Georgakopoulou ◽  
Katerina Finnis

Sociolinguistic studies of ‘minority languages’ and bilingualism have increasingly moved away from a singular emphasis on issues of ethnicity that poses direct links between the use of a language and an ethnic or cultural identity towards exploring the construction of identities that are not firmly located in category-bound descriptions. In this paper, we draw on these latest insights to account for processes of identity construction in a bilingual (in Greek Cypriot and English) youth organization group based in North London. Our main data consist of the audio-recorded interactional data from a socialization outing after one of the group’s meeting but we also bring in insights from the group’s ethnographic study and a larger study of the North London Cypriot community that involved interviews and questionnaires. In the close analysis of our main data, we note a conventional association between the ‘London Greek Cypriot’ (henceforth LGC) variety that is switched to from English as the main interactional frame and a set of genres (in the sense of recurrent evolving responses to social practices) that are produced and taken up as humorous discourse: These include narrative jokes, ritual insults, hypothetical scenarios, and metalinguistic instances of mock Cypriot. We will suggest that the use of LGC demonstrates a relationship of ambivalence, a “partly ours partly theirs” status, with the participants carving out a different, third space for themselves that transcends macro-social categories (e.g. the Cypriots, the Greek-Cypriot community). At the same time, we will show how the discursive process of choosing language from a bi- or multi- lingual repertoire does not only create identities in the sense of socially and culturally derived positions but also identities (sic (dis)-identifications) in the sense of desiring and fantasizing personas.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vadim Moldovan ◽  
Alexandru Ciobanu ◽  
William Divale ◽  
Anatol Nacu

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marquia Blackmon ◽  
Sherry C. Eaton ◽  
Linda M. Burton ◽  
Whitney Welsh ◽  
Dwayne Brandon ◽  
...  

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashland Thompson ◽  
Sherry C. Eaton ◽  
Linda M. Burton ◽  
Whitney Welsh ◽  
Jonathan Livingston ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-180
Author(s):  
Muhammad Sharif Uddin

Inequality in the promised land: Race, resources, and suburban schooling is a well-written book by L’ Heureux Lewis-McCoy. The book is based on Lewis-McCoy’s doctoral dissertation, that included an ethnographic study in a suburban area named Rolling Acres in the Midwestern United States. Lewis-McCoy studied the relationship between families and those families’ relationships with schools. Through this study, the author explored how invisible inequality and racism in an affluent suburban area became the barrier for racial and economically minority students to grow up academically. Lewis-McCoy also discovered the hope of the minority community for raising their children for a better future.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Isidora Kourti

Although public inter-organizational collaborations can offer better public services, their management is a complex endeavour and they often fail. This paper explores identity construction as a key aspect that assists in managing successfully these collaborations. The study draws upon a longitudinal ethnographic study with a Greek public inter-organizational collaboration. The research illustrates that managers should encourage partners to construct collaborative and non-collaborative identities in order to achieve the collaboration aims. It also suggests that managers should seek both stability and change in the collaborative process and offers four collaborative patterns for the effective management of public inter-organizational collaborations.


Author(s):  
Ben Cislaghi

How can we best empower people living in the most economically disadvantaged areas of the world to improve their lives in ways that matter to them? This book investigates work of the NGO Tostan as a working model of human development. The study is grounded in the ethnographic study of the actual change that happened in one West African village. The result is a powerful mix of theory and practice that questions existing approaches to development and that speaks to both development scholars and practitioners. Divided into three parts, the book firstly assesses why top-down approaches to education and development are unhelpful and offers a theoretical understanding of what constitutes helpful development. Part two examines Tostan's community-based participatory approach as an example of a helpful development intervention, and offers qualitative evidence of its effectiveness. Part three builds a model of how community-led development works, why it is helpful, and what practitioners can do to help people at the grassroots level lead their own human development.


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