Walton, Adam; (2020) Teaching and learning about gender in a Turkish university: boundary work in a polarised society. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This study explores how staff and students taught and learnt about gender in a prestigious Turkish university, in a polarised context in which gender relations had increasingly come to mark political and religious boundaries. It conceives of the institution as an academic borderland, both part of, and separate from, wider Turkish society. It considers both explicit and implicit engagement with gender relations in pedagogical relationships, curricula, values, and teaching methods. This teaching and learning is seen as intersectional boundary work, shaping and changing conceptual and social boundaries – both those relating to gender and to other forms of difference. The study draws on ethnographic work involving interviews and observations in six departments, conducted over five months before the July 2016 coup attempt. It shows how the university’s approach to gender reflected its other political and educational commitments, situating it distinctively within a divided Turkish society. Institutional boundaries shaped departmental approaches to gender in different ways. The study shows that explicit engagement with gender in classes in various departments was reported to change some students’ understandings of gender boundaries. Pedagogical approaches in other departments, while explicitly addressing gender to only a limited extent, both reinforced and challenged the departments’ associations with particular forms of masculinity. The study shows how, in a political context in which gender relations were accorded heightened significance, academic engagement with gender sometimes served to reinforce or intensify boundaries between groups. At the same time the way gender was addressed in some classes served to soften other boundaries, most notably enabling some students to see as human those they had previously rejected. Taken together these processes highlighted that engagement with gender in the university’s classrooms had implications not simply for gender boundaries, but for wider dynamics of inclusion and exclusion both within and beyond the borders of the university.

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