Processes of othering can be understood as relational and situated practices through which difference is produced, negotiated, and lived within unequal social relations. Within Borderlands Theory (Anzaldúa, 1987), othering is not conceptualised as a fixed and deficit positioning of an “outsider,” but as a dynamic process of bordering, the continual making and unmaking of epistemological, affective, and social boundaries through everyday practice (Bornstein-Gómez, 2010). Borders, from this perspective, are not limited to geopolitical or institutional demarcations; they are relational formations sustained through language, space, affect, and power, and lived across multiple scales of everyday life (Hernández & Anzaldúa, 1995).

Anzaldúa’s dialogical writings emphasise that borderlands are lived conditions rather than abstract locations. Subjects situated within borderlands are compelled to navigate contradictory regimes of meaning and belonging, producing hybrid knowledges that both reflect and exceed dominant classifications (Anzaldúa et al., 2003; Bornstein-Gómez, 2010). Bordering thus operates as a process through which difference is rendered intelligible, normalised, or marked as excessive within everyday encounters.

From a sociology of childhood perspective, these bordering processes are enacted through ordinary social practices rather than imposed solely through formal categories. Childhood is not a natural or universal stage, but a socially constructed condition actively produced through everyday relations and institutional arrangements (Prout, 1997). Attending to children’s everyday experiences highlights how borders are enacted through routine practices such as language use, spatial organisation, peer relations, and adult interpretations of behaviour. Schools can therefore be understood as borderland spaces in which children are required to negotiate multiple and often contradictory expectations of belonging, normality, and difference.

Educational research further demonstrates how schooling functions as a key site for the reproduction of social and spatial borders. Studies of schooling in Turkey show how institutional practices intersect with neighbourhood, class, and ethnic divisions, producing exclusions that are both material and symbolic. From an Anzaldúan perspective, these practices can be understood as bordering processes that position certain children as perpetually out of place, even while they are formally included within the school system.

Guided by this framework, the central research question of the study is:

How is children’s othering enacted as a form of bordering in everyday school practices, and how do children from minoritised groups experience and negotiate these borderlands within educational settings?

The study focuses on children from minoritised communities in Turkey. These groups inhabit intersecting borderlands shaped by ethnicity, language, migration status, and socio-spatial segregation. As Bornstein-Gómez (2010) argues, border subjects are positioned within uneven regimes of knowledge and power, yet they also generate meanings and practices that exceed dominant educational categorizations.

Empirical findings from the Çanakkale region in north-western Turkey illustrate how socio-spatial bordering is reproduced through schooling. Teachers’ descriptions of Roman children as belonging to “other villages” or “other neighbourhoods” enact symbolic borders that position these children as simultaneously present and out of place. Such practices demonstrate how schools extend and reinforce borders already operating across family, community, and local geographies, echoing Anzaldúa’s insistence that borders are lived across multiple dimensions of everyday life (Reuman & Anzaldúa, 2000).

By mobilising Borderlands Theory through Anzaldúa’s dialogical and interpretive texts, and situating it within sociological approaches to childhood, this study conceptualises children’s othering as an unstable and relational process of bordering. This framing foregrounds the embodied and affective dimensions of exclusion and belonging, while positioning schools as borderland spaces where inequalities are reproduced, negotiated, and potentially reconfigured. In these in-between places, othering becomes a space where a new understanding of subjectivity, knowledge, and relationship can surface, uncovering the classroom not only as a place of regulation but also as one of possibility.

To map the othering of young children, we gathered data through semi-structured interviews with 20 elementary teachers, whom we considered as insider sources of knowledge about the school setting and everyday relations produced within it. Borderland perspective heavily relies on qualitative interview as a data collection instrument since it prioritizes people’s meaning-making processes in the in-between space. Moreover, in cases involving children, research drawing on border thinking would prefer to focus on moments of tensions, inconsistencies, and struggles since this perspective would reveal the productive and sophisticated capacities of children rather than their perceived deficits or weakness. Given that access to children in school settings would be highly unlikely due to the strict and “selective” attitude of the Ministry of Education towards particular research topics as well as its current state of affairs characterised by a highly authoritarian structure, semi-structured interviews were a viable alternative for us. In addition to face-to-face interviews, we collected data from teachers working in different parts of Turkey through online interviews, which would have been unattainable without parental supervision if we had conducted the interviews with the children themselves. Achieving geographical diversity, which made it possible to include different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups in the sample, was possible through online interviews. Living on the physical and ideological borders both at “home” and “the in-between” as a mother and as being in the ethnic minority group contributed to our identifications and provided us with certain identity positions.

Drawing on Borderland thinking, this research has sought to explore children’s othering in educational settings. Children who live in borderlands-cultural, social and ideological- are generally positioned as “others” through deficit perspectives that generalize their lived experiences. In accordance with this perspective, the article has revealed how fluid and relational children’s othering can be, by challenging the deficit perspectives and emphasizing children’s hybridity, belonging and negotiation of becoming. Addressing othering in this way enables educators and researchers to move beyond binary categories of inclusion/exclusion and to see borderland as sites of tension, creativity, and possibility. Moreover, making sense of children’s othering at school through borderland perspectives might offer us an affirmative politics of possibility, reminding us that classrooms are not merely places of skills transmission but also dynamic spaces where new ways of becoming and learning can continually emerge.

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