Navigating liminality: young people’s political socialization in a conflict-affected context

Abstract This paper focuses on political socialization in a conflict-affected context and looks at how young Greek-Cypriot learners of Turkish debated political positionings and engaged with political and conflict ideologies usually seen as part of the adult world. It draws on data from two linguistic ethnographic projects (2006–2009; 2012–2015) that analysed classroom observations and recordings of controversial Turkish-as-Foreign-Language (MFL) lessons in a Greek-Cypriot Secondary School. The paper employs the concept of liminality, which has been traditionally linked with transition, describing an in-between space, where normal rules, conventions and relations are suspended or transgressed, carrying the potential for the creation of new structures and creative performance. Moving away from romantised approaches to liminality as liberating from structures, the analysis looks “inside liminality” for alternative or enduring patterns and conventions and reveals the affordances and limitations of liminal-like experiences in education settings, and their potential role in young people’s political socialization. Approaching children/teenagers as youthful political agents, the paper analyses first the multiple liminal social and political spaces that young learners of Turkish occupied; then, it focuses particularly on an interactional event, when the usual lesson structures and procedures of the language lesson were suspended, looking at how students, in this liminal-like moment, mobilized knowledge and recourses to form and debate political subjectivities and dominant political ideologies. The analysis points to the resilience of conflict discourses and discourses of othering but it also reveals youngsters’ attempts to articulate a political discourse that introduces new discursive frames for the discussion of social and political relations in a post-conflict manner. This has important implications for young people’s political socialization in conflict-affected contexts, revealing the role that language plays in this process.