Séminaire Judith de Jong

In this talk, I would like to share some findings from my master's research, in which I explore how Dutch Turkish students combine progressive political views in The Netherlands with conservative views in Turkey. The study is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation, 30 semi-structured interviews, 3 focus groups) in and around three Dutch Turkish (muslim) student associations. I investigate how diverging politics of belonging affect the political positioning and voting behaviour of Dutch Turkish students towards The Netherlands and Turkey. I study cases in which political positions become discursively tied to being recognized as a ‘good’ Dutch, Turk or Muslim. How do students respond to situations in which these normative images are posited as diverging? I suggest that public and personal debates over political values are sometimes replaced by identity conflicts. In order to maintain multiple identifications, Dutch Turkish youth at times refrain from universally positioning themselves. Instead, they argue that political positions should be rendered dependent on the countries’ level of ‘social and cultural level of development’. In these movements, they utilize a temporal narrative that is strikingly similar to language used by right-wing Orientalist and culturalist populists. I conclude by noting how students can strategically employ their ambiguous position as a discursively imagined in- and outsider in both countries to legitimize a country specific political position.

Judith de Jong holds a research master’s degree in social science, with an emphasis on anthropological/sociological theory and qualitative methods. Her research interests include processes of in- and exclusion, intersectionality and gender, and politics of belonging and citizenship. In her research, she looked at how, in light of culturalist integration politics, Dutch Turkish students negotiate multiple identities and appropriate public space in The Netherlands. Moreover, she investigated how students combine different political ideals and votes in Turkey versus The Netherlands. Currently, she works as a junior researcher in an interdisciplinary European project on misrecognition (MisMIE), based at the political psychology department of the University of Amsterdam.