GROWING UP WORKING-CLASS IN CONTEMPORARY TURKEY: LIMITED CHOICES, UNCERTAIN FUTURES

Date

2026-9-23

Author

Tetik Çoğalan, Nazlı Hazal

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This dissertation examines what it means to grow up as a working-class young person in contemporary Turkey. In this context, the dissertation aims to reveal the structural conditions under which working-class youth undergo the transitions to adulthood and how they experience, interpret, and negotiate these processes. Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted with 36 young people from working-class neighborhoods of Ankara, the study enters into dialogue with the youth transitions literature and attempts to move beyond the institutional thresholds such as school-to-work transitions and family formation in order to explore these processes. In that sense, youth transitions are explored through both material and cultural dimensions in this study. Based on the extensive qualitative data derived from the in-depth interviews, the study focuses on the structural conditions working-class youth endure and the ways in which they experience these conditions in everyday life. Field findings suggest that youth transitions into adulthood produce interlinked but contradictory patterns. These patterns are conceptualized as "working while waiting", "responsibility without autonomy", "urban presence without urban belonging" and "powerlessness and authority" in the dissertation. Finally, the study conceptualizes working-class youth transitions as a simultaneous process of class reproduction and subjectivity formation.

Subject Keywords

Class reproduction, Everyday life, Working-class youth, Youth transitions

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/121033

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis