This paper examines the constructions of Turkish nationess and the school through a perspective based on space. More specifically, the paper investigates the school as a determining element in establishing a nationalized form of space called homeland. It focuses on the amalgamation of the school with a set of homeland producing practices in Turkey, and it sheds light on how the school constructs homeland by projecting of a sense of unified place onto individuals and linking people and places together in a certain way. 

The nation is generally conceived as an “origin” that makes claims over and possesses a territory of its own. On the other hand, as discussed by Anderson (1983) and Hobshawm (1992), and as elaborated further by scholars in the fields of political and cultural geography (Kaiser, 1994, 2001; Paasi, 1996; Hedetoft, 1998), the homeland is a discursive act that fabricates the nation. Williams and Smith (cited in Kaiser, 2001, p. 316) write that “whatever else the nation may be, it is nothing, if not a mode of constructing and interpreting social space”. The making of the nation involves the making of space into a place in the form of homeland. Space becomes place through the unique gathering of things, practices, representations, meanings, and values (Gieryn, 2000). As a “historically contingent process” (Pred, 1984), national homeland is constantly made and re-made through the institutions, procedures, tactics, analyses, calculations, reflections, and narrations that generate “a cognitive, sensual, habitual, and affective sense of national identity and provide a spatial matrix which links people and place together” (Edensor, 2002, p. 37). My aim in this paper is to examine Turkish schooling within a grid of homeland producing practices, such as statistics, ethnography, and maps. 

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