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From Guest Workers into Muslims: The Transformation of Turkish Immigrant Associations in Germany
Author: Gokce Yurdakul
Date Of Publication: Jan 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0060-0
Isbn: 1-4438-0060-0
The political representation of immigrant association is central for immigrants to become political actors in Germany. This book offers a comparative analysis of five Turkish immigrant associations to point out to the diverse approaches in terms of immigrant integration and citizenship rights. By exploring these associations’ views on integration/ assimilation, nationalism/ethnicity, secularism/Islam and their relations with the mainstream German political parties, this book attempts to show that immigrants are not victims of the political decisions of the German state. On the contrary, Turkish immigrant elites become important actors to negotiate rights and memberships in the name of this ethno-national group. This book suggests an approach that recognizes the agency of immigrants in the socio-political discourse and also in the governing process.

Gökçe Yurdakul is Georg Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social

Conflict at Humboldt University, Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences. She has received her PhD. from the University of Toronto and has published widely on immigrant integration, citizenship and issues of Muslim immigrant women in Western Europe and North America.

“Offering an important contribution to the growing literature on Turkish immigrants in Germany, Gökçe Yurdakul argues convincingly for the centrality to German political life of immigrant associations, demonstrating the range of techniques employed to influence larger social policy. The book’s particular strengths are its in-depth description and the insightful analysis of a range of immigrant associations, encompassing both a political and religious spectrum. Effectively disrupting conventional assumptions about immigrant passivity and lack of agency, it shows how, as participants and political agents, the members and leaders of the associations actively engage with the German political sphere. Extremely readable, it successfully blends the political and the personal, displaying an impressive depth of knowledge and subtle grasp of the larger issues at stake both for German society in general, and immigrants in particular. This book is a ‘must’ for scholars, students and activists concerned with immigrant political participation in Europe and the changing role of political Islam.”

Ruth Mandel, University College London

Author of Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany

“With profound knowledge about the genesis of Turkish migration to Germany, Gökçe Yurdakul unfolds a distinctive and lively picture of immigrant associations’ activities and their relations to the German state and society in her empirical study. Enriched by the analysis of in-depth interviews with representatives of these organizations conducted since 2001, she shows that immigrants who lack German citizenship are not passive towards the German state´s political decisions on migration and integration. On the contrary each of them developed quite different patterns of integration. Focusing on Berlin, Yurdakul gives an impressive insight into the heterogeneity of Turkish immigrant associations and their conflicts and paradoxes on the headscarf debate which dominated the integration discourse in Germany in the last decade.”

Yasemin Karakaşoğlu, University of Bremen

Co-author of Viele Welten leben. Zur Lebenssituation von Mädchen und jungen Frauen mit Migrationshintergrund

Price Uk Gbp: 29.99
Price Us Usd: 44.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

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