Overcoming stigma: the boundary work of privileged mothers of Turkish background in Berlin’s private schools

ABSTRACT Since their arrival in Germany as guest workers, women of Turkish background have been subject to stigma and discrimination. Based on interviews with 20 mothers of Turkish background in Germany who send their children to private schools, we reveal the complex experience of stigma and discrimination interwoven with the experience of immigrant motherhood and parenting in educational institutions. We then analyze the stigma-countering strategies adopted by mothers in Berlin’s private schools. We argue that mothers of Turkish background who send their children to private schools respond to stigma and discrimination by capitalizing on their own privileges: economic opportunities, educational attainment, and aspirational global cultural capital. While they adopt strategies motivated by their understanding of “good motherhood,” they deemphasize ethnic boundaries and emphasize class status with boundaries often drawn against “uneducated” and “Middle Eastern” immigrants, aiming to reposition themselves as members of a privileged international group in Berlin.


Introduction
Sema answered our call from the well-decorated kitchen of her office in Prenzlauer Berg. At the time, March 2021, digital meetups were our only feasible option given Germany's COVID-19 mitigation measures. "My son is also here. He's studying in the next room," said Sema with a big smile. Sema is a mother and a medical doctor in her late forties who arrived in Germany from Turkey when she was nine years old. To give us a better sense of her immigration story, Sema asked us in exploratory tones, "Do you know the term Kofferkinder?" We did. The moniker is often used in Germany to denote children who were left behind in Turkey temporarily when their parents first came to work in Germany as guest workers. Sema was a Kofferkind. Yet her delayed arrival at the age of nine didn't hold her back from reaching her goals: she went on to obtain the prestigious Abitur advanced placement qualification for entry to university and built a career in Germany that was "different from her parents." As soon as she reached the age of secondary school enrolment, her family insisted that she marry and forget her dreams of continuing on to a university-track Gymnasium. "I guess I was always a rebel," Sema declared when explaining how she had convinced the principle of a Gymnasium to accept her student registration despite the sharp rebuke of her family. Once at the Gymnasium, however, she was marked as an "exceptional immigrant" by teachers and was often named as being "not like the other Turks" by her German friends, which Sema remembers with discomfort and pain. Sema's life story reveals the multilayered experiences of a woman of Turkish background in Germany, a story defined by the categories of being a Kofferkind, a rebel, a daughter, a wife, a student, and a doctor. These are some of the many layers that shape the everyday life of Sema and her experience as a mother.
Despite having passed through Germany's public education system for primary school, Sema's son, now in secondary school, attends one of Berlin's leading international private schools. Remembering her past obstacles as a student, Sema stated with conviction, "I realized that the most important thing I could pass on to my child was education … speaking as a mother with some wealth, I want to give all my financial and emotional support to my child. This is very important to me." Sema can now afford to pay the high tuition fees for the educational services she deems necessary for her son. Tennis lessons, piano concerts, international trips, and ski holidays are among the activities that she and her son enjoy. The other parents in the classroom, Sema adds, are also "international," "educated," and "have status and social position," meaning that, by Berlin's standards, they work in prestigious middle-and upper-middle-class occupations like Sema's chosen profession of medical doctor. In her words, international private schools are simply "better qualified" when compared to the public schools in her neighbourhood, Kreuzberg. Sema is one of many parents in Berlin who choose to send their children to such schools.
Sema's life story and her journey of becoming a medical doctor in Germany is braided together with her experiences of stigma and discrimination. What Sema describes as her "rebel" nature encodes the strategies she uses as a woman of Turkish background in Germany to achieve her life aspirations. As she raises her son, being a "good mother" motivates her to adopt strategies to counter stigma and protect her son from the difficulties she faced as a student in Germany. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork and 20 in-depth interviews with mothers like Sema, this research answers two questions: (1) What type of discursive and material strategies do mothers of Turkish background adopt for the purpose of overcoming stigma and discrimination in German educational institutions? (2) What are some of the outcomes of their strategies, especially for other racialized groups in Germany? Here, we focus on how some of our participants draw boundaries against other disadvantaged groups, in particular "uneducated" and "unintegrated" people, and other "Middle Eastern" immigrants. In answering these questions, we contribute to the study of intersectionality and boundary theory (Lamont, Pendergrass, and Pachucki 2015;Lamont and Molnár 2002;Yanasmayan 2016;Fischer, Achermann, and Dahinden 2020) within the immigration context of Turkey and Germany. To enumerate the complex and multilayered boundary-drawing strategies employed by immigrant mothers, we analyze their narratives concerning motherhood and their experiences with and responses to stigma and discrimination in German schools.
Benefiting from their theoretical works of Choo and Ferree (2010), Moroşanu and Fox (2013), Lamont et al. (2016), and Wimmer (2008, 2013 on the strategies used by minority groups to overcome stigma, we propose that interactionalist theories and boundary theory are fundamental to the analysis of minority experiences and group hierarchies. In fact, as already argued by Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos (2013) boundary theory and intersectionality inform each other to bring more complexity into understanding gendered, racialized and class-based dimensions of what they call as integration policies.
To better understand the relationship between immigrant mothering and stigma in Germany, we turn to Wimmer's (2008) conceptualization of "repositioning," an individual strategy to move one's ethnic group one tier up in a multitiered hierarchy (77). We argue that, in our case, repositioning is happening by deemphasizing ethnic and emphasizing class status while claiming membership of a globally-mobile international group. Here we join Moroşanu and Fox (2013) in arguing that "ethnicized stigma does not always lead to ethnicized strategies for dealing with that stigma" (448), and the effects of stigma may result in attempts to detach it from the self and reattach it to racialized others. We see such positional moves made in tandem with strategies of transvaluation (changing hierarchical orders). However, instead of transvaluation directed toward equalizing themselves with the German majority, the majority of the mothers take a different strategy. To reposition themselves in the German society, participants instead establish moral and political equality between themselves and globally-mobile international parents while emphasizing supra-ethnic, civilizational divisions, such as being "educated" or "cultured." Our interview material also points to the centrality of demands for selfworth and respect as motivations for boundary-drawing strategies against other disadvantaged groups. In Turkey's socioreligious context, mothers are conventionally coded as the "honor," understood as the moral worth, of their immigrant communities in that they are responsible for raising children who will respect and pass on the specific social values of their community (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2009). The centrality of "mothers" in our study is due to this specific role attributed to them, one challenged and transformed in the context of immigration between Turkey and Germany. Therefore, an intersectional analysis of boundary-drawing strategies aim to reveal how gendering, racializing, and marking class status shape notions of self-description, belonging, and groupness.
To avoid confusion, three conceptual clarifications are necessary. First, by using the term "private school," we specifically refer to international schools and other non-denominational schools with (relatively high) tuition fees (see the definition and related statistics provided in Grossarth-Maticek, Kann, and Koufen 2020). These schools offer an internationally recognized curriculum, education in different languages (mostly English and French, but also Spanish and Russian as supporting languages), and global degree and grade transfer (International Baccalaureate and Abibac). In Germany, confessional schools (Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish) financed through taxes levied by the German state for their religious denomination (Körperschaftsstatus) are another form of private schooling. Because mothers and their children attending these schools may have religious motivations for doing so, we excluded religious schools as a form of sample control. Since the 1990s, the number of private schools in Germany has increased by 80 percent from 3,200-5,839, while total enrolment has almost doubled (Grossarth-Maticek, Kann, and Koufen 2020). According to a 2009 report, 13.7 percent of Berlin's schools are private. Of these, 2.3 percent are Catholic, 2.1 percent Protestant, 1.2 percent Waldorf, and 8.1 percent have other affiliations (Koinzer and Leschinsky 2009). While the Catholic and Protestant schools tend to be the most affordable, the Waldorf schools, the "Free Schools" (Freie Schulen), and the bilingual and international schools are often more expensive (Kraul 2014). This difference means that parents who send their children to private schools in Germany may not necessarily share the same socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, research suggests that in general, those who attend private schools belong to a higher socioeconomic bracket in German society, and the parents who send their children to private schools are often highly educated (see Kraul 2017).
Second, in describing our study participants, we intentionally used the phrase "mothers of Turkish background" rather than "immigrant mothers" or "German Turks." This phrase indexes the simultaneous and sometimes contradictory facts of these mothers' concrete belonging to Germany and the impact of their and their families' immigration experience on their sense of self-description, belonging, and groupness in Berlin. Because some of these women were born and raised in Germany, it was important for us to replace the term "immigrant" with "of immigrant background" and to have the term "racialized" encode their experiences of stigma and discrimination along the axes of gender, ethnicity, race, and class status. 1 Third, we believe that any fixed notion of "social class" in the context of our study is disputable and destabilized, shaped by the socioeconomic realities of immigration as well as the challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the succeeding economic and currency crisis in Turkey and beyond. Instead of assuming meanings of what a "middle class" identity would look like in a rapidly changing Berlin, we employ the concept of privilege (Claytor 2020) as a set of social experiences, opportunities, and entitlements, often manifested in material and social capital, that accompany complex intersectional boundary work. By employing privilege, our goal is to explore "social class" as an interactional phenomenon with material and discursive markers of class status being transferred and translated between various sociohistorical contexts. In fact, the mothers in this study do not come from a single homogenous social class, they have diverse life stories: some grew up in working class families, some are unemployed and supported by their husbands, and others have high-earning careers. The mothers' diverse experiences and strategies for being upwardly mobile to promote self-worth and respect show the value of class markers as tools to deemphasize ethnic boundaries and detach and reattach stigma onto others in Germany.
Below, we provide a description of our case study and outline the theoretical and practical underpinnings of intersectional perspectives on stigma, discrimination, and boundary-drawing strategies. We then unpack the study's findings related to (1) boundary drawing against "uneducated" and "unintegrated" immigrants from Turkey, (2) boundary drawing against other "Middle Eastern" immigrants, and (3) repositioning to become part of a globally-mobile international group.

Theory: boundary work and intersectionality
Our theoretical framework draws primarily on the concepts of boundary theory (Fischer, Achermann, and Dahinden 2020;Lamont, Pendergrass, and Pachucki 2015;Wimmer 2008Wimmer , 2013 and intersectionality (Choo and Ferree 2010;Crenshaw 2018;Phoenix 2017;Kofman and Raghuram 2015;McCall 2005). Boundaries become essential "symbolic resources […] in creating, maintaining, contesting, or even dissolving institutionalized social differences" (Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168). They are "tools by which individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality" (Ibid.) and correspondingly represent intersectional inequalities as well as relations of groupness and belonging to certain groups. Referring to Andreas Wimmer's definition of boundary making (2008, 993) we show how institutions, in our case, private schools, provide social contexts for mothers to strategically create boundaries as they face processes of intersectional inequalities in Germany. Drawing on Choo and Ferree's (2010) definition of intersectionality as involving diverse positions within systems of oppression, we argue that mothers' experiences are produced through interactional processes in which their gendered, racialized, class-related experiences are coconstituted within the multitiered group hierarchies. In previous research, scholars demonstrated that the experiences of stigma and discrimination become central to many Turkish immigrants' life narratives in Germany (Erel, Reynolds, and Kaptani 2018). Viewed through this lens, our article contributes to this literature by analyzing how an intersectional approach may help us to reveal complex boundary-drawing strategies-that is, how gendering, racializing, and marking class status function as tools to define the boundaries between "us" and "them." We join Dhamoon (2011), who argues that manifestations of discrimination and privilege can be situated in relational processes and in group comparisons. Claytor's (2020) study of middle-class Black Americans' aspirational consumption, including the attendance of private universities, to achieve privilege in the hope of overcoming the racialized distinction between themselves and the majority group offered us the possibility to study such a situated and comparative case. Similarly, Moroşanu and Fox (2013) demonstrate that some Romanian immigrants in the UK seek to transfer the stigma they experience onto Romania's disadvantaged and stigmatized group, the ethnic Roma people. 2 For our analyses, then, centreing intersectionality is essential not only for revealing the complex and overlapping hierarchies of power but also for the strategies of overcoming and responding to such intersectional inequalities.

Methods
By focusing on the diverse narratives of immigrant mothers, our study extends across the entangled history of immigration between Turkey and Germany. For the participants who had attended school in Germany, listening to their experiences of German educational institutions showed us two different sociohistorical and biographical standpoints. The first standpoint was the experiences of discrimination of mothers who had been raised in Germany; they had been students in the 1980s and 1990s, a period marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and intense racism in Germany-specifically in German institutions, such as schools. Our participants placed a special emphasis on the incidents of discrimination and stigmatization that they experienced during their education, mostly from teachers and the school administration. Often, this period was also marked by opportunities denied to the participants and a lack of educational support. The second standpoint emerged when the participants had become mothers themselves and were interacting with their children's schools in the 2010s and 2020s. Through their own experiences in public schools, the mothers developed powerful institutional, discursive, and class-based strategies seeking to overcome intersectional inequalities and become part of a privileged group of international parents in German society.
Generated through eight months of fieldwork and 20 in-depth interviews with immigrant mothers of Turkish background who send their children to private schools in Berlin, our interview data points to the advantages an intersectional approach may offer for our understanding of the complexity of boundary drawing within immigrant groups. Berlin has the highest population of immigrants among all German cities (19.6 percent), and approximately 6 percent of the city's population are long-term residents with Turkish citizenship (Grossarth-Maticek, Kann, and Koufen 2020). During our fieldwork, we recruited participants through different professional and civil society networks in order to ensure the diversity of the participant group and to attempt to cover as many different international schools as possible.
To protect the anonymity of our interviewees we do not disclose which networks we contacted. We used purposive sampling based on two criteria: sending children to private schools and having Turkish background. We conducted the interviews ourselves 3 in person in a single sitting, at a place that the interviewees selected. In the winter of 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic slowed down the interview process. During this time, we had to conduct interviews online. Interviews focused on the immigration experience, motherhood, and the incidents of discrimination and stigmatization in German schools. In twenty interviews, we collected detailed descriptions of specific incidents in schools that involved the direct action of mothers.
Each interview lasted between one and two hours. All were digitally recorded, fully transcribed by a professional transcribing company, carefully coded using Grounded Theory's Open-Coding method (Holton 2007), and analyzed inductively and deductively both manually, on printed interview transcriptions, and digitally, by using MAXQDA qualitative software provided by the university. Following the guidance of informed consent (Sin 2005), the research ethics were explained before the interviews, and participants were given the chance to withdraw from the interviews at any time during and after the interview. Since the informed consent was sustained and the participants were not exposed to risk and high physical or emotional stress, the ethics committee approval was not required. All data was kept in a password protected folder on the cloud system of our university. All participants signed consent forms in in-person interviews or orally confirmed their consent to participate in the online meetings. To ensure the anonymity of all participants, all names used here are pseudonyms. We acknowledge that our different social positions-Gökçe Yurdakul is a middle-aged heterosexual scholar and a mother; Tunay Altay is a queer scholar with no childrenaffected how the interviewees related to us and recognize that they reflected on their experiences in relation to how they perceived our identities. We navigated these differences by cross-analyzing the interview data and taking extensive ethnographic notes to accompany the transcribed data.
While some participants completed their education (Ausbildung or Abitur) in Germany, others arrived later after completing part or all of their university education in Turkey. While 12 of the 20 participants had spent more than 20 years in Berlin, with 7 participants identifying as children of the guest worker generation, the remaining 8 participants had spent between 3-17 years in Germany, with the most recent arrival being a woman who had emigrated from Istanbul to accept a senior position in a Berlin-based pharmaceutical company. Recently arrived immigrants from Turkey are often considered to be part of a circular migration to Germany in which temporary stays are repeated, with one study reporting an increasing flow of "highly-skilled" and educated Turkish immigrants entering Germany (Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu 2018). 4 We believe this immigration diversity to be a strength in our work in that it both acknowledges the complexity of Turkish immigrants' experiences in Berlin and overcomes the methodological limitations of adopting an intersectional and multilevel research approach: although their immigration stories differed, all the mothers shared the same ambition of utilizing their economic and cultural resources to reshape the boundaries they and their children were exposed to in Germany.
Although we use the phrase "mothers of Turkish background" as shorthand, our participants form a heterogeneous group that cannot be reduced to the binary categories of newcomers and those who were born and raised in Germany. Similarly, for two participants, the boundaries between Kurdish and Turkish identities were not strong: one participant of mixed background with a Kurdish father and a Turkish mother identified as both Kurdish and Turkish, but requested to be listed as Kurdish; the other participant was Kurdish, but underlined her Sunni identity and her belonging to Turkey and Turkishness. In line with their own self-definitions, the participants were divided into the following categories: 13 Turks, 7 Kurds; 6 Germanyborn, 14 Turkey-born; 14 Sunni, 6 Alevi; 12 single or divorced, 8 married.
Most of the participants (11) were entrepreneurs in various fields in Germany, 6 were medical doctors, teachers, or professional artists, and 3 were unemployed and being supported financially by their husbands or relatives. Indeed, mothers' access to economic resources is often determined by their occupation, income, and family wealth.
Another common trait that crosscuts the heterogeneity of our interview groups is the motivation to send their children to private school. The privatization of education in Turkey is a much-studied issue (Altınyelken, Çayır, and Agirdag 2015), and has resulted in increasing numbers of private primary, secondary, and higher education institutions. Faced with economic volatility and one of the highest youth unemployment rates globally (Tokyay 2021), parents with high socioeconomic status become more invested in their children's education in order to save them from financial disaster and unemployment (see Gokturk and Dinckal 2017). We initially hypothesized that immigrant mothers who arrived with recent immigration flows would tend to send their children to private schools in Germany, as they do now in Turkey. However, besides the language barrier new immigrant families experience in German public schools, our findings showed no substantial differences between recent Turkish immigrants and the descendants of guest workers in terms of their motivations for sending their children to private schools.
Despite their differences, both recent immigrant mothers and those born and raised in Germany have been subjected to intersectional inequalities and broadly brushed with stigmatizing stereotypes about Muslim and Turkish women. In particular, German media and political discourses are awash in highly stigmatizing labels denoting the lack of integration of women with Turkish background into German society: labels for their work in care jobs cleaning and caring for the elderly, for the number of children they have, for their cohabitation in extended families, for their victimization in extended family violence. These stigmatizing labels are a function of gendered racialization and class-based discrimination (Yurdakul and Korteweg 2020).
As with Sema's experience in our opening vignette, immigrant mothers' life narratives emphasized self-reliance and resilience in the face of the intersectional inequalities they encountered in their families, schools, and German society at large. Although the extent of economic resources at their disposal differed, our participants uniformly defined themselves as self-accomplished women who had attained financial or professional stability and success (van Es 2019). This shows also in the ways the mothers negotiated and, often solely, decided on their children's schools, which, for several participants, had caused conflicts between the mothers and their husbands and families due to private schools' costs in Germany. Economic independence played a role in these negotiations, but success and stability didn't look the same for all the mothers.
Mothers of Turkish background in Germany are often perceived through the stereotype of the "Muslim woman" and are interpreted as being victims of their own communities (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2009). In relation to their professional life and financial prowess, some participants refuted such stereotypes saying that they did not see themselves as "traditional mothers" or "victims," a reference to the gendered, racialized stereotype of stay-at-home Turkish motherhood with little or no financial independence. Most took pride in working hard in their professions and built their life narratives around the overcoming of obstacles such as language barriers, citizenship status, and various forms of racism and misogyny. In addition to obstacles related to their motherhood, their life obstacles often materialized in relation to race and gender markers: their darker complexion, which stood out in German schools, and their headscarves, for which they used the Turkish term karakafa, literally "black head," used to denote Turks in general. For most of the cases in this study, the various experiences with stigma and discrimination became entangled with the strategies participants developed to overcome them.
Because we focused on the diverse narratives of mothers, our study is informed by the lived experiences of three generations-grandparents, parents, and children-and extends across the entangled history of immigration between Turkey and Germany. For participants who had attended school in Germany, their experiences with German educational institutions revealed two different sociohistorical and biographical standpoints as discussed earlier. The large volume of data generated by our intersectional approach to boundary drawing within immigrant groups allowed us to answer the two questions we posed at our research program's outset concerning the discourses and practices adopted in overcoming stigma and discrimination in German educational institutions and the role of these strategies in the reproduction of further boundary work.

Findings: boundary work for overcoming stigma
In a context where guest worker generation immigrants and their children had difficulty integrating into German schools, society, and the job market, "Turkish immigrant" became a stigmatized term within German media and political discourses. The term portrayed immigrants as low achievers in school, holders of lower-status jobs, like grocery store owners or taxi drivers, and residents of Berlin's poorer neighbourhoods. The detailed descriptions our participants gave about the stigma and discrimination they encountered during their school years in German educational institutions speak to the powerful effects of the stigmatizing "Turkish immigrant" label on our participants' educational experiences and opportunities. These incidents included denied opportunities and unequal treatment in the educational system, stigmatization through racial insults and isolation, and stereotyping that often took the form of teachers assuming that students of Turkish background were growing up in bildungsfern (uneducated) families. In addition to evidencing a perceived lack of understanding of diversity in German public schools, all our participants reported that they believe that children from immigrant families are being undervalued. In their eyes, German schools discourage children from immigrant backgrounds from high-level achievement and deny them educational opportunities.
(1) Boundary Drawing Against "Uneducated" and "Unintegrated" Immigrants from Turkey Mothers were acutely aware of the stigma attached to being a person of Turkish background in Germany and attempted to free themselves of the "Turkish immigrant" label in a variety of ways. This awareness of stigmatization led all of our participants to dissociate themselves from what they perceived as the "real" target of the stigma (Moroşanu and Fox 2013). The strategies of stigma dissociation and replication were reflected in mothers' attempts to deemphasize ethnic boundaries and blame the stigmatizing labels attached to them on "uneducated" and "unintegrated" immigrants from Turkey. 5 These differentiations between self and others were undertaken with a deep acknowledgment of the negative and essentialized views of people with Turkish background in Germany and were reflected in the mothers' political views, views on motherhood, tastes, daily activities, and trajectories of educational and professional success.
While discussing their experience in Germany, all interviewees differentiated themselves from members of the guest worker generation. Recent immigrant mothers claimed their difference based on their cultural and social differences of having been raised or lived long term in a major Turkish city or in the global metropolis of Istanbul, and on their advantages, such as their university degrees and fluency in English. Participants who were descendants of guest workers claimed their difference based on their upward class mobility, their fluency in German, and their financial and social "success" in Germany. However, this distinction is not a direct representation of the close family relationships of participants, especially for those with guest worker parents who showed sympathy and respect when talking about their parents' difficult experiences in Germany. Aside from their close family relationships and the sympathy they felt towards the older generations' experience in Germany, most of the participants defined themselves against "uneducated," "traditional," and "unintegrated" Turkish immigrants. Tuba, who emigrated to Berlin 25 years ago after getting married, has relatives with a guest worker background and characterized these families this way: There are many families who are really backward in comparison to our society. They have done nothing to improve themselves and have even done all they could to be even more backward. The way they came here 30 years agothey are in that same culture and lifestyle.
For Tuba, her decision to send her daughter to an international private school stands as material evidence of her personal achievements and her involvement in transferring her earned class status on to the next generation.
Mothers' dissociation from "uneducated" immigrants from Turkey is often strengthened by political presumptions about differences in worldviews and lifestyle. Aylin, a new immigrant who works as a senior officer in a technology development company, was definitive about her reasons: "I am trying to keep myself and my children away from unintegrated [Turkish] people because they have nothing to offer. I don't find I have anything to talk about with those people." Aylin's comments were inflected with the presumption that unintegrated Turks are Germany-based supporters of Turkey's Islamist ruling party, the AKP (Justice and Development Party). Aylin believed those "unintegrated" Turkish people who support the AKP were the real cause and targets of the stigmatization which she, too, has been subjected in Germany. Defne, who emigrated to Essen 22 years ago and is currently based in Berlin, shared similar feelings, adding, "How can someone stay a nationalist [i.e. a supporter of the AKP and the ultranationalist Nationalist Movement Party] after spending years in such international environment? I cannot understand them." Like Defne and Aylin, the majority of the mothers blamed "uneducated" Turks for the negative image of Turkish immigrants in Germany.
Mothers' choice of private schools and the participants' own expectations of what constitutes "good mothering" draw bright boundaries against "uneducated" Turks. "The people who surround me and my children are like us: educated, well-travelled, white-collar people who value education," said Derin. Like the other mothers we interviewed, Derin described providing her children with the best possible education opportunities as her "motherly duty." She stated that this provision of educational opportunity separated her from those who fail to provide it for their own children, those who are then ultimately responsible for the negative image of "Turkish immigrants" in Germany. However, these boundary-drawing strategies to deemphasize ethnic boundaries do not equate to a complete disassociation from Turkishness and Turkey's culture. On the contrary, some parents displayed cultural nationalism and described Turkish culture and traditions, especially on issues such as hospitality, hygiene, and communication, as better than German culture and traditions. From an intersectional approach that also accounts for class status, we saw these instances as mixed uses of boundary-drawing strategies in which attempts toward normative inversion operate together with the interplay between marking class status and ethnic boundaries to detach and reattach stigma onto disadvantaged "Turkish immigrants." In this way, the normative inversion here aims to reverse the existing rank order between the "majority" society and immigrant mothers (Wimmer 2008(Wimmer , 1037. Following this line of reasoning shared by all our participants, for immigrant mothers of Turkish background, being affiliated with private schools is a context where they can draw bright boundaries separating them from other disadvantaged immigrant groups while also emphasizing class status and, selectively, expressing elements of Turkishness and Turkey's culture. (2) Boundary Drawing Against "Middle Eastern" Immigrants Boundary drawing against other Muslim groups such as "Middle Eastern" immigrants and immigrants of Arab descent was prevalent in our research. In line with Lamont et al. (2016) and Moroşanu and Fox (2013), we argue that drawing boundaries against other Muslim groups, in this case immigrants from the Middle East not originating from Turkey, form part of participants' attempts to circumvent religious and racialized stigmatization by detaching it from the self and reattaching it to other disadvantaged and stigmatized groups in Germany. We believe this happens when the participants emphasize their class status as the marker of their difference from the "Muslim" immigrants and attempt to reposition themselves on a higher level in the national context (Wimmer 2008). Our findings suggest that, within the complexities of the experience of immigration, mothers of Turkish background perpetuate stereotypes that are partially controlled by perceptions of Syrian and other Middle Eastern asylum seekers and immigrants in Turkey. Some of these stereotypes are rooted in historical resentments and grievances that have dominated Turkish-Arab relations since the early twentieth century (see Yurdakul 2006). Recent developments following the outbreak of the 2011 civil war in Syria, in particular the large wave of Syrian asylum seekers now hosted in Turkey, 6 have added to preexisting negative stereotypes, with Turkish media propagating an anti-immigrant position and accusing displaced Syrians of being lazy and living off of taxpayers' money. Similar stereotypes about Syrians circulate in Germany. When faced with this growing anti-Arab and anti-Middle Eastern stigma in Turkey and in Europe, participants attempted to draw bright boundaries, accentuating the differences between themselves and other Middle Eastern immigrants.
Five participants of mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds drew bright boundaries against Muslim immigrants from Middle Eastern countries. These boundaries became most visible when we asked them about their reasons for choosing private schools over public schools, about their own communities and self-descriptions, and about their views on immigration and racism in Germany. Ilkay, a Turkish Alevi mother who used to work as a senior manager for a travel company in Turkey, considered Turkish people as Europeans, not Middle Easterners: As a Muslim country, we also have serious differences between Turks and Middle Easterners. In my opinion, we owe it to Atatürk … I am definitely not a racist person, but … you know, these Syrians, these Arabs … are far from our culture. I mean, it's not something they choose-to be born in Saudi Arabia or to be born in Syria. Being a Muslim is not something they chose either … But people need to improve themselves. This drawing of bright boundaries between Arab immigrants and participants extended to educational settings. Inci reported that a parent at her daughter's school forbade her daughter from playing with Arab students in the same group during recess, which Inci said was probably due to anti-Arab sentiments. The spatial boundary drawn between individual Turkish and Arab students also escalated to group levels. Deniz, a 39-year-old Turkish mother and an entrepreneur, described how her 14-year-old daughter had been subjected to mobbing in a public school by a group of students Deniz labelled as an "Arab gang." When the school administration failed to act on the mobbing incident, Deniz moved her daughter to a private school. Following this traumatic experience, her daughter began psychological counselling. Deniz noted her disdain for Arabs because they form gangs in schools.
Conflicts between students of Arab descent and other Muslim students were reported by our participants as being commonplace in Berlin schools. Heval, a participant who grew up in Turkey and immigrated to Germany with her two children, noted the provenance of the bias: "Arabs were always represented badly in Turkey; [Middle] Eastern countries are portrayed badly in general. I don't know how easily [we can] overcome this prejudice." As Heval's comments reveal, bright boundaries between "good Turks" and "bad Arabs" are extended to other Middle Eastern countries and refugees who came to Germany with the civil war in Syria and later during the long summer of migration of 2015. These boundaries also reflected on participants' descriptions of their neighbourhoods, especially for the ones residing in immigrant and refugee-populated areas. Sema said that her neighbourhood, located between Kreuzberg and Neukölln, "deteriorated" socially after the arrival of refugees. Similarly, Berivan noted that her main motivation for sending her 17-year-old daughter to a private school was to flee the public school in her neighbourhood, a school densely populated with immigrant and refugee students from the Middle East.
As a strategy for drawing boundaries against Arab immigrants and refugees, the choice of a private school over a public school advances one's own group higher in the multitiered group hierarchy. Yet some mothers strengthen these boundaries even further by emphasizing their internationality as opposed to their Middle Eastern background. Foreign (European) language education, especially in English, is described as an extension of this "internationality" (see also Cesur, Hanquinet, and Duru 2018). All the schools covered in this study provided intensive English-language education, as well as less-intensive courses in the European languages of French, Spanish, and in one case, Russian. Begüm says that she sent her daughter to a private school because of her daughter's mindset: I decided to send my daughter to private school, even before my daughter was born. This is my worldview (kafa yapım böyle) … When she was five years old, my daughter said "Mother, I want to learn English." … She has been learning English since first grade.
Recourse to the discourse of "mindset" to draw boundaries is an extension of other terms our participants used: "international," "global citizens," and "mixed." For the mothers, "mindset" referred to an open mind grounded in principles of inclusivity and tolerance toward other cultures and pleasure in interacting with a selective international group of parents (for similar observations on "ethics," see Rottmann 2019). This selectiveness excludes disadvantaged groups, specifically those densely populated with students from the Middle East, with whom our participants did not want to be associated. To overcome discrimination against Turks and Muslims in Germany, the participants often interpreted themselves as a mixed international group, and selectively drew boundaries against Muslim immigrants from Middle Eastern countries.
(3) Repositioning to Become Part of a Globally-Mobile International Group In addition to the boundary-drawing strategies our participants embraced so as to deemphasize ethnic boundaries and emphasize class status with the aim of detaching stigma from themselves and reattaching it to other stigmatized communities, our findings suggest that participants attempt to reposition themselves and their children via private schools so as to assert their privilege in Germany. The majority of our participants reported that they chose to enrol their children in private schools because of the diversity of the student body and parents, which was positively labelled as "international" by all our participants. We understand that employing the label of "international" for private schools blurs ethnic boundaries (Wimmer 2008) and emphasize non-ethnic markers and categories over ethnic ones. Participants' descriptions correspond with literature describing the guiding concepts of Germany's private schools as a pedagogy of individual growth, lifelong learning, academic excellence, and world citizenship (Krüger et al. 2015). To clarify our conceptual grounding, we separate this use of the "international" label by the private schools from that of the participants. At the discursive level, the term "international" was used by mothers not only to describe the cosmopolitan values of equality and diversity, but also to denote the group attending private schools: globally-mobile children of employees in international organizations, multinational companies, and diplomatic missions. Because it is used by mothers as a group identifier and not just to denote values, the term "international" indexes the importance of private schools' high social standing within the mothers' stigma-countering strategies.
In contrast to the consequences of stigmatized labels of "Turkish immigrant" or "immigrant," participants were aware that being labelled as "international" enhanced their life prospects. The diversity inherent in being "international" in Berlin was contrasted with the public schools, described as being overcrowded with mostly "immigrants," whom the participants defined as "Middle Easterners," Arabs, and "uneducated" or "unintegrated" immigrants from Turkey. One participant named Inci, a 39-year-old owner of a restaurant in Berlin, further described this international aspect, relating how it shaped their experience as a religious minority in Berlin: A Brit, a Czech, an Irishman, a Kenyan, a South African-they all have different religions. One is Catholic, another is Protestant or atheist. It doesn't concern us at all because we're beyond religion.
In contrast to the stigmatized stereotypes associated with being a "Turkish immigrant," Inci identified the characteristics of an international parent as being "globally mobile," "multilingual," "tolerant of other cultures," and "extremely positive about diversity." These were qualities she could perform and find in others only in private schools.
Repositioning to become part of a private school's international and globally-mobile group particularly allowed some Muslim and headscarf-wearing participants to command respect and detach themselves from the stigma of the victimized "Muslim woman." Two pious religious mothers-Hamide, a 42-year-old Turkish entrepreneur who grew up in Germany and who had the widely memorized and displayed Ayetel Kürsi (Quranic verse) hanging on her wall during our interview, and Özlem, who wore a Muslim headscarf -felt comfortable displaying their religion in their children's private schools. Often this comfort was made possible through transvaluation, equalizing Islam's and Turkey's morals and values with the globally-mobile international group to which they aspire. While pointing out the beautifullyframed photos adorning her office desk, Hamide added in a cheerful tone, "This is the photo of my daughter in Australia, and this Is my son when we travelled to Canada and Morocco in 2015." Hamide's daughter is a globetrotter, and her son attends a private high school in Berlin. Hamide stressed that her school experiences as a Turkish immigrant student in the 1990s do not now form part of her children's lives. Similarly, Özlem could not recall her child ever having experienced discriminatory incidences at her private school, although she had experienced discrimination in her own student life. She described how she was once ordered to leave an important qualifying exam because she was wearing her headscarf in the exam hall. As these cases demonstrate, the stigma that normally attaches to headscarves and other Muslim religious identity markers and that serves to separate Turkish and Muslim students from their non-Muslim European classmates in public schools becomes, in the student body at private schools, simply part of the valued international and heterogeneous mix.
The salient difference between our findings and those in Moroşanu and Fox's (2013) study on Romanian immigrants in the UK is that mothers of Turkish background did not claim "whiteness" as their racial non-difference with white and ethnically Germans. Their claim of superiority through repositioning was not directed toward becoming German. On the contrary, the majority of our participants praised their ethnic identities and cultures in contrast with those of the "inhospitable" and "uncultured" white and ethnically Germans. "There are many differences between Turks and Germans. Turks are friendlier, more kind and charitable people. Germans, on the other hand, are more self-centered" says Fatma, a senior officer in a pharmaceutical company in Berlin, when we asked her whether she saw herself as being similar to Germans. This salience of normative inversion towards the majority German culture may be a reactive (Çelik 2015) strategy that attempts to restore the stigmatized stereotype of the "Turkish immigrant" for a selective, privileged group who have access to social and economic capital.

Concluding remarks
In this study, we have unpacked the boundary-drawing strategies of mothers of Turkish background through an intersectional analysis of their life narratives along the axes of race, gender, and class status. Our findings reveal that these strategies are interlinked. We found that "good mothering" draws bright boundaries against "uneducated" Turks and Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. Attempting to reposition themselves in a higher level, participants redirect stigma towards other disadvantaged groups by downplaying the importance of elements of racialization, namely ethnicity and religion, and emphasizing individual successes and other achieved qualities. The investment in education in private schools forms part of participants' ongoing efforts at social mobility and repositioning so as to acquire further privileges in Germany.
While the study confirms participants' decision to send their children to private school as a stigma-countering strategy for overcoming the intersectional inequalities they face in German society, our intersectional analysis brings to light the multilayered and complex boundary-drawing strategies that make these private schools appealing to them: Transvaluation and repositioning to join an international, globally-mobile group while using educational attainment and "good mothering" to draw boundaries against "uneducated" Turks, Arab, and "Middle Eastern" immigrants. While pitying other immigrants and refugees as the "real" targets of racism in German society, our participants also used stigmatizing labels for them such as "unintegrated," "backward," "ignorant," and "less-educated" in an attempt to portray their own group as superior. In so doing, most of the participants appropriated discursive strategies to separate themselves from immigrants of Arab descent, from their own ethnic and religious communities of different socioeconomic backgrounds whom they labelled as "backward," and finally, from non-internationalized and working-class white Germans, whom they described as "provincial." The attempts described by Moroşanu and Fox to "detach [stigma] from the self and reattach it to the ethicized other" (438) materialized in our fieldwork in relation to private international schools, which were used by these mothers of Turkish background to avoid discrimination and stigmatization in public schools and join a group of globally-mobile, international parents.
The unfavourable conditions in public schools in Berlin added to these mothers' decision to choose private schools, one motivated by a wish to offer their children a better learning environment free from discrimination and stigmatization. Participants pointed out that teachers and administrative staff in Germany are ill-equipped to adequately respond to incidents of discrimination and stigmatization in public schools (see Fereidooni and Massumi 2015).
In addition to our primary findings, Alevi and Kurdish participants reported that their children were repeatedly discriminated against by Turkish children. Although our limited sample allowed us to trace a common line of feeling toward immigrants with an Arab background, a more detailed study would be required to better understand the racial legacies still operating between Germany and Turkey and their resonance in German schools. Another limitation to this study was the difficulty in conducting research with minors in Germany. Although we wanted to include students' voices, we refrained from doing so due to ethical concerns as well as the COVID-19 restrictions in educational institutions. Another pressing issue, one harder for us to assess because of the lack of participatory research possibilities due to COVID-19, was that of the boundaries separating middle-class and ultrarich families in private schools. Little research has examined privileged Turkish immigrants' upward mobility in Germany, with the main body of literature on Turkish immigrants' experiences in Germany still focusing on labour immigrants and working-class families. Although working-class and disadvantaged groups represent a significant portion of the total Turkish immigration to Germany, this singular focus misses the complexities of Turkish immigrants' experiences in Berlin in relation to upward mobility. We suggest that a fruitful line of future research would examine how, from the perspective of their children, mothers' boundary-drawing strategies affect the children's lives.
Ultimately, this case of mothers illustrates the complex and multilayered relationships that attend boundary drawing and unpacks them through a situated intersectional analysis. Although our participants in this study did not share a specific salary scale, they did all share the same motive of utilizing their economic and cultural resources to send their children to private schools. In line with Lamont et al. (2016), we argue that the boundary drawing strategies discussed here are responses to the ethnoracial hierarchies starkly reflected in these mother's stories of stigma and discrimination in Germany. In this regard, private schools offer privileged mothers the possibility of becoming an international parent unmarked by the stigma and discrimination attached to their embodied difference. For mothers who can afford to move their children out of the public school system, their choice of a private school often came bundled together with drawing new group boundaries at the expense of further marginalizing other disadvantaged immigrant and refugee groups. In the midst of the constant boundary-drawing strategies of Turkish families, the children of Turkish background now attending private schools have come to be the bearers of their families' stigmatized and discriminated past as well as their families' strivings for an inclusive, diverse, and international future. Notes 1. We use "racialization" to refer to the processes through which racialized groups are formed, segregated, and stigmatized as other. These processes are shaped by sociohistorical contingencies as well as by social norms concerning group differences and ideas about "race" and "ethnicity." As Gotanda (2011) argues, the term "Muslim" has, in the post-9/11 era and through a process of racialization, acquired meaning beyond religion to describe a racial category. In the context of our research, we approach racialization as a heterogenous and dynamic concept that denotes the attitudes and prejudices as well as the experiences of discrimination. 2. The case of Romanian immigrants in the UK is socio-historically different than then immigrants with Turkish background in Germany. However, the analytical tools (detaching and reattaching stigma) in Moroşanu and Fox's article is useful and relevant for our study. In fact, while Ignatiev's seminal historical study How the Irish Became White (1995), which narrates the story of eighteenth-century Irish immigrants to the US who attempt to gain privilege while oppressing black Americans, is also not a direct comparison to Turks in Germany, it has been an inspiration for this study. 3. Two interviews, for which Gökçe Yurdakul and Tunay Altay organized the appointment, were conducted by two early career researchers for training purposes with Gökçe Yurdakul in attendance. 4. According to the study, 253,640 people emigrated from Turkey to Germany in 2017, a 4 percent increase from 2016. Demographically, the largest age cohort was 25 to 29-year-olds, with 29.9 percent of whom came from Istanbul. 5. The use of "Turks" in this context is a reflection of the participants usage of this category. By referring to Turks, the participants often refer to immigrants from Turkey and people with a migration background whose parents or grandparents migrated from Turkey. 6. Turkey hosts two thirds (3.7 million or 66 percent) of the more than 5.6 million registered Syrian refugees worldwide.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
In July 2020, the German Bundestag provided funds to set up a National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa) at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM-Institut). This study is funded as a part of NaDiRa after a competitive funding process. For more information, please see: https://www. rassismusmonitor.de/ueber-nadira/ (in German). We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.