Racialization and Belonging in Higher Education: Counternarratives of Turkish Belgian Students From a Community Cultural Wealth Perspective

Abstract

This study focuses on how Belgian students of Turkish origin reflect on and resist inequities and racialized othering while attending a predominantly White university in the Flemish-speaking northern part of Belgium. Building on the insights of an antideficit framework, community cultural wealth (T. J. Yosso, 2005), the study demonstrates students’ knowledge, skills, and capital in navigating their racialized belonging in higher education and society. This research seeks to fill in the gaps in the literature by centralizing the experiences of marginalized students as valuable resources of knowledge and challenging the deficit framework that rationalizes inequities by blaming racialized ethnic minority communities as lacking capital to succeed within the education system. A qualitative approach comprising a critical counternarrative methodology was adopted to unpack the narratives of 20 undergraduate Turkish Belgian students. The findings suggest that Turkish Belgian youth are enacting their community cultural wealth in complex and interconnected ways by drawing on their cultural, linguistic, social, and familial capital to critique, make sense of, and resist everyday and institutional forms of racialization and reclaim their belonging. The counternarratives of students particularly highlight the key role of family and friends in helping them maneuver through structures of inequity and othering as well as their aspirations to making their families proud and contributing to community well-being. The implications for higher education practice include recognition of students’ resources and competencies within and outside classrooms and creating conceptual and physical spaces that affirm and amplify these.