Hazal Hurman

HAZAL HURMAN, then a graduate student at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Ethnography at the Children’s Table: Childhood and Political Anxieties in Contemporary Turkey,” supervised by Dr. João Biehl. This research seeks to understand how ethno-racial sensibilities and political anxieties are reconfigured under Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian regime. A central force shaping children’s daily struggles is an intensifying regime of “lawfare,” in which the governing Justice and Development Party resorts to criminal prosecutions and mass incarceration to contain political opposition and discipline the populace. Marked by the racialization and juvenilization of criminality, Turkey’s lawfare constructs and instrumentalizes children as vital “moral and political assets” — alternately framing them as innocent, ignorant, perilous, or as the “terrorist other.” These shifting representations are materially reinforced through the fragmentation of urban space into zones of exception, where the rights and protections typically associated with childhood are unevenly distributed along racial and class lines. Drawing on ethnographic research across courtrooms, securitized and segregated neighborhoods, and transnational asylum routes in Antep, a multiethnic southeastern city along the Syrian border, this dissertation explores how Kurdish, Roma, ethnically Turkish, and Syrian refugee children encounter and interpret state violence, surveillance, and ethno-nationalist policies. It demonstrates how authoritarian regimes mobilize childhood to cultivate a compliant, homogenous citizenry, while simultaneously generating contradictions that children both absorb and resist.