A Guide for Deconstructing Social Reproduction: Pedagogical Conocimientos within the Context of Teacher Education

As the mosaic of student demographics continue to change into the 21st century, teacher credential training programs must necessarily prepare educators to be culturally affirming and responsive to the equitable schooling of students. Through pedagogical conocimientos, educators-in-training may rely on self-reflexive methodologies, which facilitates the engagement of self and others in interaction, as they collectively retrieve family legacies, focusing on gathering histories on their family’s origins, language, religion, work, education, and migration. This prepares future teachers to unearth and examine internalized prejudices, traumas, and stereotypes, to thus counter and contest deficit thinking and distorted views of student populations, beginning with them. This chapter introduces pedagogical conocimientos, illustrating the praxis as it problematizes social reproduction in the context of schooling.

Visibility through invisibility: Spatialized political subjectivities of Alevi youth

This article investigates Alevi youth subjectivities in a neighborhood of İstanbul, Okmeydanı, in which mainly Alevi people live, through the youth’s self-positionings in revolutionary groups, which has deeply marked the highly politicized history of the district. The grievances of Okmeydanlı Alevi youth have grown increasingly complex, stemming from experiences of violence, family legacies of victimhood, and, in recent years, new forms of exclusion. Coupled with generational ruptures between youth and their families in experiencing Alevi identity, Alevi youth have created a political identity and collectivity in the sphere of revolutionary politics. In this politicization, Okmeydanı becomes a spatialization of resistance which gives the youth a sense of power to achieve solidarity and find intimacy to defend themselves and their rights. Moreover, for the youth, engaging in a revolutionary political identity enables them to define themselves and redefine Alevi identity in contrast with, and sometimes against, the perceptions of their families. I argue that it is through this performativity that Okmeydanlı Alevi youth achieve self-empowerment and identity construction; and through this performativity in street politics that the youth render their agencies and self-representations visible on public space.

Making Histories

This article reflects upon a Heritage Lottery–funded project devised by Britain’s leading practitioner of reminiscence arts, Age Exchange. “Meeting in No Man’s Land” explored the different family legacies of the First World War by bringing together the British and German descendants of its veterans.1 The project process had many similarities to the practice of oral history, but there were also significant differences. This article considers the shared territory of the two methodologies while at the same time acknowledging the uniqueness of Age Exchange’s approach to the making of histories.

Imperial Transgressions and Spiritual Investitures: A Begam’s “Ascension” in Seventeenth Century Mughal India

Islamic jurisprudence and social customs regarding laws of inheritance privilege Muslim males as legitimate successors to family legacies and wealth. Furthermore, these heads of households were and are expected to sustain and uphold family values while representing the noble “face” of their legacies. Though women in pre-modern Islamic societies were awarded property and income to support them, they were neither required nor encouraged like their male counterparts to use their agencies or largesse to make banner representations of their lineage or heritage. This essay challenges androcentric ideas and practices surrounding Islamic laws of inheritance through the example of the Mughal princess Jahānārā Begam (1614-81) and her articulations of ascension. This analysis demonstrates how the princess’s extraordinary relationship with her emperor father, Shah Jahān (r. 1628-59), facilitated her spiritual and imperial achievements and elevated her rank in imperial and Sufi hierarchies.