PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The Kurdish issue and the representation of the Kurds have generally remained a relatively neglected topic among Turkish psychologists. We have recently demonstrated that a common lack of interest is closely related to the political atmosphere of the country. Despite this general neglect, there are a few researchers who have been interested in the Kurdish question recently. In this article, we investigate the language and discourse of these studies – one way or another – related to the Kurds in order to reveal the knowledge-power production relations in Turkish psychology. To this aim, we subjected psychology theses on Kurds, written between 2000 and 2019 to thematic analysis and examined how psychology deals with and defines the Kurds. As a result of the preliminary analyses, we have found that the distribution of theses is quantitatively concentrated in the social change period called the ‘Peace Process’ in Turkey (i.e., 2009-2015) with a diversity of topics, methods, and content. Thus, we selected a total of 32 theses; three of which correspond to the period before the Peace Process, fifteen correspond to the period of the Peace Process and fourteen correspond to the period after the Peace Process for the thematic analysis. The results show that the Kurds are mainly discussed within the meta-themes of “Kurdish Issue” and “Defining Kurdishness”, respectively. The Kurdish Issue consists of State Oppression/Tyranny, Turkish-Kurdish Relations, the Kurdish question/problem, and Conflict & Violence themes, respectively. On the other hand, Defining Kurdishness consists of the Kurds, the Ignored, the Ethnocultural Minority and the Subordinate Group themes, respectively. In this paper, we delve into a more elaborate picture of the results with examples from emerging themes and the transformation of these themes during the changing political atmosphere. We also address the relationship between authority/state and knowledge/academia in light of the hegemonic discourse of Turkishness in the Turkish Republic.