The cultural politics of school relocations: an ethnographic study of an Istanbul neighbourhood school

In Turkey, the social and economic changes of the past couple of decades have facilitated a neoliberal reconstruction of the city and a concomitant reorganisation of its educational spaces. The interaction between the urban space economy and school spaces has been documented by various studies, most of which point to the interplay between education policies and the racialised restructuring of urban spaces. In Turkey, this process has been particularly convoluted, perhaps more so than anywhere else. With reference to a particular school relocation/closing case, this article examines how school relocations induced by urban transformation have interacted with the desecularisation of the education system in Turkey. By drawing on the responses of a specific neighbourhood to the relocation of their school, I argue that school relocations are inextricably linked to the material and symbolic reorganisation of neighbourhoods and lead to the destabilisation of secular middle class neighbourhoods and their schools. And by showing how neoliberalisation interacts with inherited regulatory systems, through this research article I aim to contribute to the existing literature on the interaction between education policy and urban space.