Ülke içinde yerinden edilmiş ailelerin çocuklarının eğitim algısı: İzmir ve Diyarbakır'dan bulgular

Turkey experienced conflict-induced internal displacement due to the political and social unrest, in the late 1980s and during the 1990s, in East and South East Anatolia regions. The unplanned and involuntary nature of migration led internally displaced persons (IDPs), and in particular forced many Kurdish migrants’ children to poverty. Within this framework, this study aims to explore how internally displaced families’ high school attending children experience poverty in two cities, İzmir and Diyarbakir. In this thesis, it is argued that the motive behind child poverty among internally displaced children is an overlapping process of forced migration and consequences of neo-liberal economic policies in Turkey. Although high school education is not compulsory in Turkey, these displaced students prefer to attend high schools instead of working (or besides working) to contribute household budget despite the fact that they are from poor families. In particular, the research aims to understand internally displaced children’s expectations from high school and the barriers to their education. Based on the assumption that education, in today’s economic structure, is the only way for displaced children to achieve upward social mobility, the main research question of this study is that whether high school education would enable these children once caught in poverty in Diyarbakır and İzmir to achieve social upward mobility. All in all, but, it is claimed that although these children seem far from improving their lives through attending high school, social and economic inequalities from the beginning of their lives are barrier to their futher educational achievement and developing their human capital, and hence hinders their social upward mobility.M.S. - Master of Scienc