Minority Students’ Responses to Racism: The Case of Cyprus

Abstract

While research has focused on the role of racism in (re)producing ethnic/racial inequalities in education, there is very little research that investigates how variability in minority students’ responses to racism can be explained. By using an ecological approach to integrate existing research on actors’ responses to racism, this study finds that researchers have generally neglected factors and processes situated at the micro- and meso-levels of analysis. Qualitative interview data with Turkish–Cypriot children enrolled in schools in the predominantly Greek-speaking part of the Republic of Cyprus are used to investigate their strategies in response to racism and the factors that explain the observed variability in their responses. The findings suggest the importance of and interactions between factors situated at different levels of analysis, including the level of organizations and social groups and face-to-face interactions in explaining variability in young people’s responses to racism.