This paper examines student mobility from Sub-Saharan Africa to Turkey and the role of Turkish and English language teaching programs in constructing these international students as bridges between their homelands and their host country. The paper argues that Turkey, located at the nexus of Africa, Asia and Europe and could be ambivalently classified under both categories of the South and the North, or the East and the West, has been serving as a liminal space that has emerged due to various social, political, and economic reasons at a local, regional and global scale. Accounting for the configurations of linguistic resources in such spaces liminal is imperative in order to explore material and symbolic resources gained by or denied for individuals as well as institutions therein.
Therefore, the paper draws from institutional and sociolinguistic ethnographic research into the daily practices of Sub-Saharan African students in Turkey paying special attention to their interaction with a network of actors and institutions. Following the students' personal and academic trajectories, the study initiates at a state university and expands into non-governmental organisations, student-led societies, state institutions, and trade organisations. The focus on the intersection of the processes, practices and formation of selves desired and engineered by policymakers and institutional stakeholders suggest narratives built upon the peculiar conceptualization of a transnational community sharing a common history and faith. The imagination of the past that goes back to the Ottoman Period and the faith that unites Muslim-majority countries do not differentiate between the South and North; hence, it seeks to establish middle-power status and bridge-building role in regional as well as global political arena. Multilingual Sub-Saharan African students who also gain proficiency in English and Turkish engage with a range of actors and institutions as well as norms, values and ideologies promoted and circulating in these spaces. Packaged as brokers, SSAn students are positioned as agents to bring about a disruptive and transformative change that bears potentialities for their homelands, Turkey and beyond.
As such, the study prompts a re-thinking of the North-South divide in scholarly work, and draws attention to multiple hierarchies in the South and the North with various linguistic resources, cultures, and histories in contrast to their configuration as homogenous entities. During this interactive process, as individuals and collectivities situated at these peculiar hierarchies engage with each other drawing from shared values and imaginations, the emergence of new conditions might lead to new forms of social life, categories, solidarities, and alliances in the field of education, politics, and economy with consequences for local, regional, and global power dynamics.
