Out of Europe: agency and biographicity and discourses of ethnic-cultural belonging, inclusion and exclusion

The demands laid on the individual by increasingly fragmented life-wide learning imperatives lead to constant pressure on adults of ‘migratory background’ to display agency and take up a position vis-à-vis cultural-ethnic ‘belonging’, while around them an integration/assimilation debate continues to rage in German public discourse. The focus of this paper will therefore be the experiences of transition and transformation in learning biographies which are often experienced as self-‘translation’. The paper will address agency, inclusion/exclusion in the learning biographies of young adults who straddle the precarious identity of German-Turk/Turk-German. I use here talk elicited in the learning biography of a student of Turkish origin. The assertion of agency-in-diversity is given voice in uneven ways. The extracts allow us to listen closely to the workings of agency in the subjective, shared experience related in auto/biographical narratives. (DIPF/Orig.