Making of Community in the Margins of Turkey

This book aims to understand the experience of living in the margins of Turkey through the accounts of the inhabitants of the one of marginal districts, Okmeydanı. To achieve this purpose, the work focuses on a community in Okmeydanı, whose members identify themselves the local people of the district. Taking the shared understanding of the members of this community as the point of departure, this study analyzes the making of community in the margin and scrutinizes two common issues in the narratives of the local people of Okmeydanı: public representations of the neighborhood and the degeneration within. The whole study is an ethnographic attempt to reflect on the ways of speaking against hegemony while avoiding the reproduction of hegemonic language.