This study focuses on the link between Turkish language teaching programs for international students who are constructed as bridges between Turkey and their homeland, the ways norms and discourses emerging in language classrooms and relevant spaces construe belonging if embraced and enacted, and re-imagination of a nation-state seeking soft power through transnational ties to be established by these students.
Drawing from sociolinguistic and institutional ethnography, the study initiates at a public university and expands into spaces that are linked to the emergence of policies, practices and discourses employed in language classrooms. Among these spaces, state institutions and civil society organisations are of great importance to investigate the role of Turkish language training in the reconceptualisation of the nation, circulation of relevant ideas and their infusion into processes that may shape international students' personal, academic and professional trajectories within and beyond Turkey. The study argues that stakeholders in these institutions engage with two forms of new nationalism: Pan-Turkism and Islamic Ummah with decolonial undertones. Though these strands might converge at an imagined past as in the case of Seljuk and Ottoman States accentuating the Turkic and Islamic identity, they address regions and peoples with distinct histories, cultures, languages, and political economies. The neo-nationalism emerging in line with a developmental agenda repackages the nation with a quite peculiar and wider understanding of who counts as a citizen and what counts as a nation, in stark contrast to the state ideology and discourses disseminated during the foundation of the Republic of Turkey which defined the nation in a rather narrow frame with regard to adherence to values, norms, and reforms configured by the state elite to promote an imagined nation and to create desired citizens. With this new form of nationalism, Turkey seeks to redefine its status in the global economy and politics by cementing alliances and harnessing soft-power through education, trade and cultural diplomacy in regions it has previously ignored and underexplored such as Sub-Saharan Africa.
The research thus accounts for the ways Turkish language training facilitates this process by conveying key ideas relevant to the imagination of a broader nation, offering them the communicative resources required to navigate institutional and organisational spaces involved in the neo-nationalist and developmentalist project, and enabling them to gain access to material and symbolic capitals benefitting their very own trajectories.
