Being, learning and becoming at the borderlands: an ethnographic narrative research study looking at educational experiences of the Western Thrace minority group in Rodope, Greece.

Konidari, Eleni (2016) Being, learning and becoming at the borderlands: an ethnographic narrative research study looking at educational experiences of the Western Thrace minority group in Rodope, Greece. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis is based on an ethnographic narrative inquiry with members of the
Western Thrace minority group in Rodope, Greece. The study contributes to
debates about minorities and education in Thrace, investigating how research
participants’ ethnic and religious identifications, constructed as ‘Otherness’ have
influenced their experiences in education.
Drawing mainly on the Bourdiean theory of habitus and grounded on the concept
of ‘narrative imagination’ (Andrews, 2014), the study explores the interrelations
between being, learning and becoming. It investigates how participants’ sense of
self and belonging and their aspirations play out in their educational narratives.
The analysis is guided by issues of access and belonging to various spaces,
physical and symbolic distances and movement between spaces.
Data are drawn from three sources: narrative interviews with young and old
people from Rodope, state archives from the 1950s and 1960s, and field notes
from public events about minority education. This compilation of historical and
contemporary, public and private narratives elucidates degrees of distance on the
one hand, between the grand narratives of the Greek State and the minority
group’s formal advocacy networks and on the other, the largely unheard small
narratives that circulate in private spaces.
The study argues for a holistic approach which takes conditions of being into the
discussions of learning, while also opening up the understandings of what
counts, for group members, as learning and learning spaces. Moreover, the thesis
contributes to the unpacking of the notion of ‘minority’: it problematises the way
the term is used in public discourse, and elucidates aspects of intra-group
heterogeneity and power hierarchies. By breaking out of the normalised
discourses and agendas the research suggests that the small stories might bring
a change in the established way of doing minority politics in Thrace.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Education and Lifelong Learning
Depositing User:	Users 4971 not found.
Date Deposited:	21 Jul 2017 08:37
Last Modified:	21 Jul 2017 08:37
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/64219
DOI:

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