Learning to Feel Like a Nation: Nationalism and Emotions in Turkish School Books

• Applicant: Dr. Deniz Kilincoglu
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 520731789

How do we learn to think, feel, and act as a member of a nation? How does the sense of national belonging become a part of our common sense? This project explores these hitherto understudied questions by investigating the dynamics of instilling national sentiments into children’s minds in schools. The importance and the urgency of these questions originate from the fact that despite decades-long research on nationalism as an ideology, program, and movement, the dynamics of how it shapes individual thought and action are still not well understood. In this regard, an interdisciplinary inquiry into the epistemic and emotional dimensions of the creation of a “national” out of a child is key to understanding how nationalism operates. As one such inquiry, this project analyzes nationalist narratives in primary- and secondary-school textbooks, which represent the historical and contemporary sociopolitical reality from an apparent “in-group vs. out-groups” perspective. These narratives, this project suggests, ingrain certain cognitive and emotional patterns into the children’s minds that regulate their perception of reality as a member of a particular nation, thereby shaping their sociopolitical beliefs and actions. The project focuses on Turkey as a highly-informative case due to its centralized school system, and the unquestionable dominance of an unabashed ethno-religious nationalist ideology. The project deals especially with the last four decades (1980–2020), during which the country has experienced a transition from a radically secular and military-overseen political regime to an Islamic-conservative and autocratic one. This enables the researcher to observe the continuity, as well as change, in nationalist narratives during such a radical sociopolitical transformation. Tracing the continuity in this respect brings a fresh perspective to the existing literature, which focuses almost exclusively on the question of Islamic change during this era. Moreover, since nationalism is experienced in the diaspora as well as within the borders of the nation-state, the project takes the Turkish-German case as a comparative unit. It juxtaposes Turkish school books produced for Turks in Germany with those used in Turkey to achieve a richer analysis of Turkish nationalist narratives produced for different sociopolitical settings. Mainly through narrative inquiry of school books, this empirically-grounded interdisciplinary research project investigates the connections between nationalist ideology and individual thought and action, focusing particularly on narratives and emotions that link these two levels. By bringing together empirical, methodological, and conceptual contributions from the sociology of knowledge, the history and sociology of emotions, nationalism studies, and narrative inquiry, this project aims at building an innovative and seminal interdisciplinary approach to the question.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants