This dissertation has two main foci: first, on the experiences of Turkish women in the German educational system, and to what extent state policies, cultural pressures, and personal choice influence their decision to pursue higher education; second, how state policies, cultural artifacts and official documents can elucidate these women’s individual accounts. This dissertation is further framed by the following sub-questions: In what ways do women of Turkish descent employ both ‘Germanness’ and ‘Turkishness’ to successfully navigate the educational system and to resist educational and social marginalization? What tensions arise between these socially-constructed identities? To explore these questions, this dissertation employs both in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women of Turkish descent in Berlin and document and cultural artifact analysis.
Chapter 1 offers an overview of the discourse used to construct the Turkish female immigrant stereotype as unwilling and unable to integrate into German society, Chapter 2 is dedicated to using the current literature in the field to frame this discourse in an historical, social, and cultural context. Chapter 3 addresses the use of intersectionality as the methodological tool in this dissertation, the aim of which is to address identity as a dialogue between the individual and larger structures of power and that categories of identity, as processes constructed through power relations, hold both internal and external components. This chapter also highlights the ways in which intersectionality as a methodology informs the methods and frames the ways in which the resulting data is interpreted. Chapter 4 highlights the results of the dissertation research in the form of four emerging themes: the use and significance of language; laying claims to belonging; retrospective attitudes towards educational experiences; and gendered cultural identity. These themes, which emerged from the women’s individual interviews, are supported by relevant document and cultural sources. While Chapter 4 offers a cursory interpretation of the four emerging themes, Chapter 5 offers a deeper exploration of the ways in which these themes operate in tension with, and are co-constituted by, the official discourse. It speaks to the voids in the existing literature that were addressed in Chapter 2 and offers an explanation for the ways in which an intersectionality approach to understanding Turkish women’s educational experiences in Germany furthers the research on issues of immigration, educational policy, and gender in an educational context. I end by addressing the study’s limitations, implications for future research, including the ways in which this study can be extended to other German contexts and to international settings.