I dont want to be pushed into an islamic

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‘I don’t want to be pushed into an islamic school’: biography and raciolinguistic ideologies in

education

Nadja Thoma

To cite this article: Nadja Thoma (2020): ‘I don’t want to be pushed into an islamic school’: biography and raciolinguistic ideologies in education, Race Ethnicity and Education, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2020.1798390

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1798390

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‘I don’t want to be pushed into an islamic school’: biography and raciolinguistic ideologies in education

Nadja Thoma

Department of Education, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

ABSTRACT

This article argues for the significance of biographical theory in

research on raciolinguistic ideologies in education It accounts for

biographies as a basis for the study of the ways in which students

conceive the languages, social spaces and power relations which

shape processes of inclusion and exclusion Taking anti-Muslim

discourses in Austria as a point of departure, this article introduces

raciolinguistics as a way to theorize the co-naturalization of

lan-guage and race in education It then delineates the use of

biogra-phies to contextualize understandings of the significance of

language across the life course In the empirical part, I analyze the

biographical narration of a university student who wears

a headscarf I focus on her experiences with the specific relationship

between anti-Muslim racism and language in different stages of her

life The final part of the article discusses how biographical research

can contribute to a broader understanding of raciolinguistic power

relations in education.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 28 August 2019 Accepted 15 July 2020

KEYWORDS

Raciolinguistic ideologies; anti-Muslim racism; language ideologies; language biographies; biographical theory; teacher education

Introduction

Over the last two decades, migration has moved to the center of political debates in Austria, and there has been a considerable shift to the right in the political landscape This shift is characterized by the normalization of a view of minoritized individuals and groups both as a threat to internal security and as a burden to the social state and the educational system (Wodak 2018, 324) Far right movements and political parties depict the idealized ‘gendered and racialized national body’ (Rheindorf and Wodak 2019) as compromised by an ‘other’, which embodies an ‘archaic culture’ (Ajanovic, Mayer, and Sauer 2018, 649) The representation of the ‘others’ who are mainly individuals and groups labeled as ‘Muslims’ is shaped by a juxtaposition of ethnicity and gender, wherein male Muslims are deemed dangerous (Scheibelhofer 2012) and female Muslims are seen

as victims of ‘their’ culture (Inowlocki and Lutz 2000) At the heart of discourses around Muslim girls and women there have been debates about the headscarf as a symbol of oppression (Sauer 2009)

Not surprisingly, these discourses have had several effects in education: Refugees in Austria are obliged to attend ‘value courses’ as part of German language training The Austrian Integration Fund (Österreichischer Integrationsfonds) combines language

CONTACT Nadja Thoma nadja.thoma@univie.ac.at

https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1798390

© 2020 The Author(s) Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any

med-education with ‘value med-education’, thus assuming that individuals with non-European citizenship do not share the same values as Austrian citizens (Heinemann 2017, 178), especially when they are from predominantly Muslim countries In addition to the 2017

‘Integration Act’ which banned the wearing of the full-face veil in public, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) presented a list of demands for new laws, one of them concerning

a ban of headscarves in public offices, schools and universities (Ajanovic, Mayer, and Sauer 2018) Aside from these immediate legal effects, empirical studies have revealed that anti-Muslim discourses also affect how teachers labelled as ‘Muslims’ are perceived More concretely, such teachers are constructed as a threat to educational systems (Karakaşoğlu and Wojciechowicz 2017) and are confronted with assumptions about the incompatibility of wearing of a headscarf and holding a teaching position, especially

as a German teacher (Knappik, Dirim, and Döll 2013) This is due to the fact that raciolinguistic ideologies underlie the notion of ‘language as a key to integration’ (Gatt

2013), a mantra which has dominated discourses on language policies in Austria and has led to the instrumentalization of language for identity politics (De Cillia and Dorostkar

2013, 158)

The article at hand analyzes the biographical narrative of a student who wears

a headscarf and who, at the time of data collection, was enrolled in a teacher training program for German teachers at an Austrian university It is part of a sample of 12 biographical-narrative interviews with minoritized university students which lasted between 1.5 and 3 hours

The following research questions guided the analysis: (1) What raciolinguistic power relations do students experience, especially in institutions of education? (2) How does the institutionalized knowledge about language(s) interact with the biographical knowledge

of the students? (3) How are the professional aspirations of students endangered by language ideologies, and which strategies do they develop to modify and resist them?

Theoretical background – connecting raciolinguistics and biographical theory

This article draws from two central theoretical frameworks: raciolinguistics (Alim, Rickford, and Ball 2016; Flores and Rosa 2015) and biographical theory (Dausien and Alheit 2019; West et al 2009) In this section, I contextualize the study at the nexus of these concepts in order to show how biographical research can enhance our under-standing of raciolinguistic ideologies in education

Raciolinguistics as a way to theorize the co-naturalization of language and race in education

Language ideologies are social constructs based on assumptions about the value and power of linguistic forms and discursive practices They do not simply refer to dimen-sions of linguistic structure and use, but are imbued with political and moral significance Moreover, they reflect the interests of the social groups which bear them and are part of strategies for maintaining social power and domination (Irvine and Gal 2000; Kroskrity

2010; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994) Educational institutions are also places in which power is reproduced, and studies of multilingualism have revealed how language

ideologies that underlie educational policies conflict with the reality of students’ linguistic and identity practices (Farr and Song 2011) Researchers have noted the issue of con-flicting language ideologies of teachers (Palmer 2011) and examined the extent to which critical awareness towards language ideologies deals with the inequalities perpetuated by the prevailing ideologies (Siegel 2006)

In recent years, a growing body of literature has been concerned with the systematic analysis of the co-construction of language and race in education (Alim, Rickford, and Ball 2016; Rosa and Flores 2017; Valdés 2015) More specifically, researchers have shown

that raciolinguistic ideologies ‘conflate certain racialized bodies with linguistic deficiency

unrelated to any objective linguistic practices’ (Flores and Rosa 2015) Moreover, they have revealed that assessments of racialized individuals’ language use ‘often invoke broader ideas about the (in)competence and (il)legitimacy of entire racialized groups’ (Rosa 2016) Thus, the same language practices are framed and monitored in different ways, depending on the social status and the racialization of the bodies of speakers (Flores, Lewis, and Phuong 2018; Flores and Rosa 2015) Building on Inoue’s concept of

the listening subject (Inoue 2006), Flores and Rosa shift the analytical interest from the

speaking to the listening subject They argue that constructions of linguistic categories in

which learners are placed are not based on discrete linguistic practices, but produced by white listening subjects (Flores and Rosa 2015, 157) Analyzing the co-construction of language and race across different national contexts, researchers have been able to describe manifold facets of the marginalization of differently racialized individuals and groups in education (Ennser-Kananen, Jäntti, and Leppänen 2017; Reyes 2016; Sung

2018) Using a wide range of theoretical and empirical concepts, they also approached possibilities of resistance to marginalization (Rampton 2001)

For the study at hand, research on language ideologies in teacher education is especially relevant It documents how aspiring teachers and their educators construct the relation between language and race and how their co-constructions become relevant both for students’ professional aspirations and opportunities and their views on language

in education (Briceño, Rodriguez-Mojica, and Muñoz-Muñoz 2018; Ek, Sánchez, and Quijada Cerecer 2013; Nguyen 2012) As it is not only language learners, but also

language teachers who are (non)native speakered (Aneja 2016) through different social and institutional processes, it is necessary to analyze how they deal with raciolinguistic ideologies However, aspiring teachers are socialized within raciolinguistic spaces long before they enter higher education The concept of raciolinguistic socialization (Chaparro 2019) has been developed to understand the impact that connections between language and race can have on socialization processes and academic trajectories of children and youth

The focus of this article is on the specific relationship between anti-Muslim racism and language After an analysis of the co-construction of religion and language and its effects

on professional development in education, the concept of raciolinguistic socialization will be critically addressed and applied The aim is to develop the concept further by using ‘biography’ as a theoretical concept for the analysis of socialization processes (Dausien 2018) and accounts for biographical research in order to enhance the overall understanding of raciolinguistics in education

Biography as a theoretical key concept for the investigation of language across the life course

Since its beginnings in the 1920s, biographical research has contributed to consider-able cross-disciplinary research Theoretically, ‘biography’ is conceived as a social format of self-construction and as a process of sense-making which emerged through the modernization of Europe (Hahn 2000) In his model of the institutionalization of the life course, Kohli refers to the evolution of an institutional program that regulates one’s movement through life ‘both in terms of a sequence of positions and in terms of

a set of biographical orientations by which to organize one’s experiences and plans’ (Kohli 2007, 255) From his perspective, the normative life course is based on wage labor and is divided into three periods: preparation, ‘activity’, and retirement (Kohli

2007, 255)

These considerations are also significant for educational contexts in which biography- generating norms such as the age structure of educational pathways and the coupling of education titles with social career paths come into play (Dausien, Rothe, and Schwendowius 2016b) On the one hand, institutions structure and standardize life paths (Dausien, Rothe, and Schwendowius 2016a), and, on the other, they represent

a discursive framework that both sets the limits of what can be narrated and forms the framework in relation to which stories can be told This way, institutions provide

a ‘grammar’ for biographical self-construction, but not in a determining way Rather, individuals make sense of institutionalized orders of interaction and power relations and can be seen as active agents in engineering their own educational processes (Dausien and Alheit 2019, 14) They invest ‘biographical work’ (Fischer-Rosenthal 2000), a practice of orienting temporal processes in one’s own life and surroundings, and make use of their

‘biographicity’ (Alheit 2010), a creative potential that allows them to shape both their experiences and different biographical and institutionalized forms of knowledge in creative ways, allowing for the creation of a ‘biographical sense’ (Alheit and Dausien

2018) In addition, they acquire ‘biographical knowledge’, a form of knowledge that is acquired through the combination of various experiences during the life course and which is seen as a prerequisite for the formation of new experiences and new knowledge (Rothe 2017) The need for biographical self-reflection is provoked by experiences of contingency and by events and actions that call for classification and normalization Crises, contradictions, inconsistencies and gaps are imposed on individuals and they force the subject to respond (Kohli 1987, 433) To cope with crises, it is necessary to reflexively organize one’s own experiences in such a way that biographical continuity, consistency and identity can be ensured, while allowing new perspectives to be generated (Alheit and Dausien 2018) This kind of performance through which the subject encoun-ters new biographical situations that order and create meaning is called biographization (Fabel-Lamla 2006, 83)

Since biographies transcend the particularity of individual cases and focus on ‘the embeddedness of the biographical account in social macro-structures’ (Apitzsch and Inowlocki 2000), biographical research is not about isolated individuals or their views, but about subject-context-relations (Dausien 2002) Therefore, it is an ideal approach for understanding how individuals deal with situations and make sense of their experiences

in racialized and otherwise hierarchically organized societies

Biographical approaches have been widely used to understand processes and condi-tions of educational inequality, focusing on different categories of social differentiation, such as migration (Schwendowius and Thoma 2016) and gender (Merrill 1999) Using biographical accounts as data, researchers have been able to show how processes of inclusion or exclusion are produced in educational institutions and how dimensions of belonging shift across the life course In addition, they have analyzed how social and institutional circumstances shape the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual curiosity Such research has examined the links between personal and professional identity of educators and how teachers construct their professional identity against the backdrop of their biographical experiences (Schwendowius 2015) Furthermore, scholars working in this field have revealed how language biographies are constructed in postcolonial and post-apartheid settings and how individuals experience and subvert language ideologies (Busch 2006; Thoma 2018)

Finally, ‘biography’ is a useful means through which it is possible to reconstruct processes of socialization First, it allows the reconsideration of how actions and inter-pretations of subjects are interwoven with the structures of the social world (Fischer and Kohli 1987) Second, the temporal dimension of biography allows for the reconstruction

of the sequential and often non-linear structure of the life course in which past, future and present are intertwined in the perspectives of the subjects Third, the linking of biographical events manifests itself as a reflexive process in autobiographical representa-tions Both self-interpretations on the part of subjects and their non-reflected experiences guide their future actions (Dausien 2018)

Methodology and methods

Methodologically, the previous theoretical insights are closely linked to the method of biographical research developed by Schütze (1983, 1984), in which research participants are asked to tell their whole life story This particular methodology for the study of life stories was chosen because it allows us to understand: 1) the process of the creation, reproduction and transformation of social phenomena; 2) both the courses of action and the meanings actors assigned to their experiences at different times in their life (Rosenthal 2004) However, life stories are not narrated into a vacuum Rather, we orient our narratives towards stories that serve as patterns and sometimes as models worth imitating (Dausien and Kluchert 2018)

The findings are based on the analysis of 12 biographical interviews1 with minoritized students, who, at the time of data collection, were enrolled in German studies programs

in Austria and were pursuing careers as teachers of German German Studies programs are a particularly interesting field of research because in these programs German is not only the language of communication and instruction, but also the object of research Against the background of language ideologies which presume a natural connection between language, speakers and territory, my assumption was that the national language may be connected to how life trajectories of students and their future profession are imagined

Different methods of analysis in biographical research share the principle of abduction and a theory-building approach (Dausien 2006), taking individual and collective single cases as a point of departure (Riemann 2005; Rustin 2000) In line with interpretative

social research, the claim of generalization in biographical research is not based on statistical, but on theoretical representativity (Hermanns 1992)

Since biographies consist of stratifications of experiences organized in a sequential order, the narratives have to be examined in light of important transitions or turning points in one’s life course, such as migration, educational transitions, changes at work or shifts in important relationships (Schütze 1983) Thus, researchers gain access to biographical process structures These structures differ in the degree of intentionality and of agency the biographers ascribe to them for the relative period in their life (Schütze 1984, 95).2 Biographical case reconstruction was combined with positioning analysis (Deppermann 2015) This analytical concept allows one to analyze how the characters are relationally positioned within reported events, how narrators position themselves towards an audience, for instance as participants in research, and how narrators position themselves vis-à-vis dominant discourses (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008) Furthermore, positioning processes are closely linked to the ways in which language ideologies position narrators and to the ways in which research subjects take up or resist these positionings (Pavlenko 2001, 139) In addition, positioning analysis complements and interrelates ideally with biographical analysis because it is opposed to static and essentialist views of identity and allows researchers to analyze how identities develop over longer periods

Combining these analytic approaches is ideal for research on social inequality because

it allows for a conceptualization of individuals as neither objects of social conditions nor

as entirely ‘free’ actors Furthermore, this combination facilitates an analysis of the multiple facets of positionings across time by analyzing narrators’ movement between positionings in the narrative and vis-à-vis the interviewer

Against the background of anti-Muslim discourses outlined in the introduction,

a Muslim student’s biographical narrative was chosen for the empirical part of this study Although the students in the sample have various experiences with language ideologies, students who wear headscarves face the most perceptible barriers in their university and upon entry into their new careers as teachers This makes an analysis of their stories particularly fruitful in understanding the significance of biography in how raciolinguistic ideologies operate

Günnur Duman’s biographical narration

Contact with Günnur Duman3 was initially made by a colleague who teaches at

a department of German Studies After a short conversation by e-mail, I told Günnur more about my research interest over the phone She immediately agreed to an interview and invited me to her home The apartment where she lived with her husband and her two-year-old sun, was in a major city in Austria in a working-class neighborhood shaped

by migration where she was born and grew up The following section starts with an overview of main biographical stations in Günnur’s life It then provides an analysis of excerpts of her biographical narration which enable an understanding of the raciolin-guistic contexts in which she was raised and the way in which she relates to them and makes sense of her experiences The central topic in Günnur’s biographical narration is her desire to be accepted as a legitimate member of Austrian society and to be a German teacher

Main biographical stations in Günnur Duman’s life

Günnur Duman grew up with three younger siblings and her parents who both migrated from Turkey Her father works as a butcher and meat supplier, while her mother has been very active in the Islamic community in the neighborhood where she taught in a mosque during Günnur’s childhood and attracted attention for her unorthodox teaching meth-ods Günnur’s childhood was shaped by a strong relationship to religion Aside from regular visits to mosque together with her father, her grandmother introduced her to literacy at an early age while reading and reciting parts of the Koran together

After primary school she attended a Gymnasium, the more prestigious of two different secondary school tracks in Austria, and attended a commercial academy afterwards Upon graduation, all her friends and schoolmates took up commercial jobs or started studying economics Günnur ruled out both options and took up her mother’s suggestion

to build on her experience with tutoring younger students and to enroll for a teacher training program She chose to study German and history as subjects During her third study year, her son was born At the time of the interview, Günnur was 25 years old and about to complete her studies

Raciolinguistic contexts during childhood

Günnur starts her biographical narration by focusing on her strong ties to the neighborhood where she grew up and still lives, thus constructing herself as ‘rooted’ in Austria and in the city In her narration, she assigns her mother a key role in having shaped her linguistic repertoire During the reconstruction of her language acquisition process, she mentions that she had some knowledge of German already before entering kindergarten She continues:

[ .] aber ich weiß, dass immer, wenn wir rausgegangen sind, also in der Öffentlichkeit, in der Straßenbahn etcetera, daa hat meine Mutter immer Deutsch mit mir gesprochen Und das is das WEISS ich Und (1) ich kann mich sogar erinnern, einmal hat sie gesagt, hat sie mein Papa erzählt: ‘Und die Günnur, die is so gscheit Wenn wir draußen sind, redet sie immer auf Deutsch mit mir, und wenn wir wieder zu Hause sind, dann redet sie, aso oder wenn wir mi_ also unter Türkischsprachigen sind auf Türkisch’ (1) Aso i anscheinend hab ich das von meiner Mutter übernommen dieses ‘O.K jetzt sind wir draußen auf Deutsch’, wobei ich das jetzt ganz anders betrachte, und das auch versuche (1) ABZULEGEN, weil ich das nicht in Ordnung finde, warum ich jetzt unbedingt, nur weil ich in der Öffentlichkeit bin, Deutsch redn muss, ich kann viele Sprachen und ich werde die Sprache sprechen, die ich sprechen möchte (9/38-10/2)

[ .] but I know that whenever we went out, in public, in the tram et cetera, my mother would speak German to me And that I KNOW And (1) I can even remember, once she said, my dad told her: ‘And Günnur, she is so clever When we’re outside, she always talks German to me, and when we’re back home, or when we’re among Turkish speakers, she talks in Turkish’ Apparently I have picked up from my mother this ‘O.K now we are outside, in German’, whereby I now look at it quite differently, and also try to (1) GET RID

OF IT, because I don’t think it’s okay, why do I have to speak German now unconditionally, just because I am in public, I can speak many languages and I will speak the language I want

to speak (9/38-10/2)4

This passage can be read as an example of how language works within processes of biographization Günnur emphasizes that she has been used to communicating in

German in a very natural way since her early childhood Moreover, her report implies that intergenerational communication also occurred – at least in public – in German, which retrospectively places her familial communication close to the communication of

‘natives’

Interestingly, the family does not use any of the different practices which transcend the use of distinct languages, such as crossing (Rampton 2005) or translanguaging (Creese and Blackledge 2010; García and Lin 2017) Rather, the passage reveals that the family had established a bilingual practice, creating two linguistic spaces: While Turkish was restricted to home, German was assigned to the public space, which shows an adaptation

to the dominant language in Austria and contributes to ‘the silent reality’ (McNamara

2011, 439) of immigrant multilingualism Günnur’s account can also be interpreted as an attempt to oppose homogenizing discourses on ‘guest workers’ (Alpagu 2019; Pásztor

2016) in which this group is generally portrayed as lacking German skills, and in which the Turkish language is usually associated with working-class immigrants

According to the father, the daughter’s intelligence is exemplified by mimicking her mother’s practice of switching languages The unspoken conventions about the use of languages in public illustrate how closely the dominance of German in Austria and the language use of minoritized people living there are linked and the extent to which speakers are aware of the prestige of different languages and the social status of their speakers Although the family lives in a part of the city where Turkish is very commonly spoken, German is the language intended for the public, and Turkish is relegated to the private sphere Günnur argues that as a child she ‘adopted’ this language choice and that she ‘now’ looks at it in a different way It is unclear when exactly this ‘now’ began, but she has dealt with critical theories of language and postcolonial theory in her studies It is possible that her relationship to language use has changed because of her academic engagement with these perspectives on language In any case, the passage ends with her announcement that she will no longer take others into consideration in her choice of language in the future, and that she wants to create linguistic spaces in a self-determined way Besides giving insights on raciolinguistic socialization, this passage reveals how raciolinguistic ideologies are embedded in an individual’s biography and how the individual’s perspectives on these ideologies have changed during her life course

Experiences with German and religion at school

In her biographical narration, Günnur mentions the schools she attended only briefly and progresses quickly to the present time During the reconstruction of her pathway to the study program of German, she includes a flashback to her school time in which she notes the significance of German to her biography, thus also legitimizing her choice of studies:

Deutsch war immer schon mein Lieblingsfach, das Fach, in dem ich IMMER gut war, und das war immer so etwas Besonderes weil die Lehrer auch immer gesagt haben ja du als, ja, quasi, Schülerin mit Migrationshintergrund, du solltest gar nicht so gut sein und du bist die beste also in der Klasse besser als wie Schüler und Schülerinnen mit Deutsch als Erstsprache und ich hab immer so eine gute Beziehung zu meinen Deutschlehrerinnen gehabt also im Gymnasium auch in der Handelsakademie, sie warn immer von mir, beGEISTert DASS ich eben das so gut kann und mitmach (2/10-17)

German has always been my favourite subject, the subject in which I was ALWAYS good, and that was always something so special because the teachers also always said ‘Yes you as a, yes, student with a migration background, you shouldn’t be so good at all and you’re the best in class, better than students with German as their first language’ and I’ve always had such a good relationship with my German teachers, so in secondary school and in the commercial academy

as well, they always were EXCITED about me THAT I can do that so well (2/10-17)

In this account, Günnur further elaborates her relationship to German language learning and in doing so demonstrates how biographization involves the reiteration or rewriting

of lived experience The frequently used adverb ‘always’ refers to a continuity in the biographical connection with German, which can be seen both on the emotional level (‘my favourite subject’) and on the level of good school performance (‘ALWAYS good’)

In addition, a biographical continuity is constructed in the relationship with teachers whom Günnur retrospectively regards as witnesses of her linguistic abilities and achieve-ments Thus, Günnur constructs both her passion for German as a subject in school, her academic performance in the language and her good relationships with her German teachers as a constant in her educational biography

However, she also experienced situations of othering in which her migration back-ground was connected with deficit-oriented expectations about her academic language skills More specifically, she points out that being ‘the best in class’ was a surprise for others, as was being ‘better than students with German as their first language.’ Both examples show that the starting point of praise for her German was in fact a negative assumption based on raciolinguistic ideologies

After this flashback, Günnur’s narration progresses towards her forthcoming transi-tion into the teaching profession Again, she goes back to her school time and recalls:

Es war auch so dass ich ahm mir überlegt hab immer schon in der Schule ahm, so die Entscheidung ein Kopftuch zu tragen oder nicht, das war für mich immer so ‘Ja ich möchte, aber, wie werden meine Freunde drauf reagieren’ hab ich so also das war wirklich ambivalent (1) ich hab, das schon IMMER gewollt ich hab bin aus einer also meine Familie würd ich eher als religiös bezeichnen also Religion ist ein Thema bei uns in der Familie, und, es war aber nie ein Zwang da, ich wollte sogar schon nach der Volksschule hab ich (immer?) (einmal?) zu meiner Mama gesagt ‘Mama wie wär’s wenn ich am ersten Schultag äh im Gymnasium ein Kopftuch trage’ und meine Mutter hat dann gemeint

‘Aber du bist noch ah du bist noch ein Kind und das ist eher was für Erwachsene du musst einmal darüber nachdenken dir im Klaren sein was es bedeutet’ (2/24-34)

It was like, that I always considered uhm in school uhm, so the decision to wear a headscarf

or not, that was for me always so ‘Yes I would like, but, how will my friends react to it?’

I have that was really ambivalent (1) I have ALWAYS wanted that I am from a, so, my family, I would rather consider it religious [ .], and, but there was never a compulsion,

I even wanted already after elementary school, I (always?) (once?) said to my mama, I said

‘Mama, what about wearing a headscarf on the first day of school uh in high school?’ and my mother meant ‘But you’re still ah you’re still a child and that’s more something for adults, you have to think about it first, to be aware of what it means’ (2/24-34)

This account introduces another aspect that contributes to the layering of Günnur’s experiences Here, Günnur constructs her wish for a headscarf as one without a starting point (‘I have ALWAYS wanted that’) In the reconstruction of her decision process she refers both to her own concerns about possible negative reactions from her friends and to her mother’s advice not to wear a headscarf Her remark about the non-compulsive