Encounters between the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘oppressor’: rethinking Paulo Freire in anti-racist feminist education in Sweden

With the aim of rethinking Paulo Freire’s theory and its practices in race/ethnicity and education, this article uses intersectionality to deepen our understanding of differences among the oppressed and break the opposition between the oppressed and oppressor. Based on an ethnographic study carried out at a feminist adult educational institution in Sweden, the author examines the positionality of migrant students and feminist teachers and how they react to othering in the educational process and in Swedish society. The author also argues for the importance of intersectionality as a way to help both the conscientization of the oppressed and the radical task of the liberatory teachers. It is crucial to untangle gendered and sexualized racism, especially in specific contexts where race and gender intersect to construct a binary between a ‘superior us’ and a ‘barbaric Other.’ Conscientization and intersectionality are particularly useful for probing the complicated processes of othering and combating different forms of oppression and racism in an era of globalization in Western countries.     

Shopping for identity: articulations of gender,race and class by critical consumers

This article discusses a study which explored shopping as a process of incidental adult learning about consumption, globalization and citizenship among self-identified critical shoppers in Vancouver, Canada. The author focuses on participants' comments about social identity, especially in terms of gender, race and class. Reflecting current concerns, many participants noted that the environment and (un)fair trade influenced their shopping practices, and helped them understand themselves in the context of a ‘multicultural’ society and a ‘globalized’ world. This article borrows from the jargon of municipal recycling programs, part of a critical consumption discourse, in outlining how participants' comments seem to ‘reduce,’ ‘reuse,’ and/or ‘recycle’ hegemonic notions of gender, race and class. Working from a neo-Gramscian perspective, the author uses this metaphor to explore both the tendency to reiterate an understanding of gender, race and class as essentialized characteristics and attempt to resist that simplistic understanding.     

The dynamics of negation: identity formation among Palestinian Arab college students inside the green line

How does granting certificates of ‘business clean of Arab workers’ to owners of shops, stores, and Jewish businesses who prove they are not employing Arab workers shape identity? Identity development involves making sense of, and coming to terms with, the social world one inhabits, recognizing choices and making decisions within contexts, and finding a sense of unity within one's self while claiming a place in the world. Since there is no objective, ahistoric, universal trans-cultural identity, views of identity must be historically and culturally situated. This paper explores identity issues among members of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel. While there is a body of literature exploring this subject, we will offer a different perspective by contextualizing the political and economic contexts that form an essential foundation for understanding identity formation among this minority group. We argue that, as a genre of settler colonialism, ‘pure settlement colonies’ involve the conquering not only of land, but of labor as well, excluding the natives from the economy. Such an exclusion from the economy is significant for its cultural, social, and ideological consequences, and therefore is especially significant in identity formation discussed in the paper. We briefly review existing approaches to the study of identity among Palestinian Arabs in Israel, and illustrate our theoretical contextual framework. Finally, we present and discuss findings from a new study of identity among Palestinian Arab college students in Israel through the lens of this framework.     

Flexible ethnic identity,adaptation, survival,resistance: The Garifuna in the world-system

In this paper we examine flexible ethnic identity formation as a mechanism of accommodation and resistance deployed by a particular social group with origins in the periphery as they respond to changing political and economic forces in the world-system. This paper addresses criticisms that world-system analyses are ‘too macro’ or ‘structurally deterministic’ by examining on the ground action and responses by a local oppositional movement within its broad political and economic context. Its focus is an historical case study of a particular group of people whose origins lie in European colonial expansion into the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. The paper begins by recounting ethnographic reports of Garifuna origin myths, then sketches this group's forced incorporation in a colonial world-system (and their responses), discusses their assignment to ‘minority group’ status within newly independent Belize at about the same time they are establishing transnational communities via migration to the United States, and concludes with some thoughts on the emerging ‘virtual communities’ of Garifuna and indigenous peoples around the world that are emerging on the worldwide web today. We explore what the notion of ethnic identity means in this particular case, and how and why it changes over time. We also try to understand if this flexible identity, and the social movements that arise as it is redefined, can be understood as a form of ‘resistance’. Finally, we ask if diasporic identity movements of indigenous people, like the Garifuna, actually or potentially can contribute to rising challenges against the forces of contemporary ‘globalization’.     

Migration Management and Humanitarian Protection: The UNHCR's ‘Resettlement Expansionism’ and Its Impact on Policy-making in the EU and Australia

Since the late 1990s, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been a key actor in the resurgence of refugee resettlement in global debates on asylum and refugee policies. This article investigates the dynamics of the international organisation's ‘resettlement expansionism’ within the UNHCR as well as its impact on policy-making. Firstly, it analyses how the UNHCR has increased its expertise production and dissemination as well as its operational focus on resettlement. Secondly, it assesses the policy-making impact of the UNCR's ‘resettlement expansionism’ in two distinct contexts: the elaboration of the EU's new joint resettlement scheme and the recent increase of resettlement places by 40% in Australia, a traditional country of resettlement. Lastly, it discusses potential implications of this research in regards to the evolution of the global refugee regime and, more conceptually, to the study of knowledge production and expertise in migration and refugee policy.     

Marketing an imagined Muslim woman: Muslim Girl magazine and the politics of race,gender and representation

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an ‘idealized’ Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a ‘can-do’ woman, who is also committed to her faith. This ‘ideal’ woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is ‘marketable’ (and marketed) as the ‘good Muslim’ (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the ‘familiar stranger’ (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called ‘modern’ Muslim (read: ‘good Muslim’) is juxtaposed both against the ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim (read: ‘bad Muslim’) and the ‘normalized’ white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations – and the purposes which they serve – provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called ‘integrated North American Muslim’ – a ‘modern’ or ‘good’ Muslim – within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces – ideological, cultural, political and social – that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications.     

Land of welcome,land of fear: explaining approaches to ‘new’ diversity in Catalonia and South Tyrol

This article contributes to recent work on the interplay between sub-state nationalism and migrant integration, showing the different government approaches toward migration developed in Catalonia and South Tyrol and exploring factors behind this divergence. In particular, the articles emphasised three main interplaying variables: (1) previous historical experience with internal migration; (2) how this experience shaped the process of national identity construction; (3) and the institutional context, that is, arrangements in place to regulate and manage ‘old’ diversity. In this way, the article lays bare additional contingent processes that advance accounts of the relationships between ‘old’ national minorities and ‘new’ migrant communities.     

Exile,gender and identity: the short stories of Afghanistani author Maryam Mahboob

The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the largest migration of the Afghanistani population in modern history. More than six million people migrated to neighbouring countries, and to North America, Europe and Australia. Among them were almost all of Afghanistan's female authors; some eventually returned, but others chose to remain in diaspora. Some stopped writing, while others have continued. Maryam Mahboob was the first Afghanistani female author to leave Afghanistan (in 1981). Her major works since then have dealt chiefly with the issues of women living in ‘Outlandia’. Having been treated as second-class citizens in Afghanistan, how do Afghanistani migrant women perceive their social status in a new environment? How has migration affected the lives of Afghanistani women of different generations? Have they assimilated with the new culture and adopted new identities, or have they retained their cultural identities and stayed in closed communities? How do these women perceive their ‘new home’ vis-à-vis the ‘old home-land’. What does it mean to be a female author from a Third World Islamic society living and writing in the First World? Why does Mahboob still write overwhelmingly about themes from her place of origin and in her native language, after so much time abroad?     

‘In England,they don’t call you black!’ Migrating racialisations and the production of Roma difference across Europe

This article draws on long-term fieldwork among Slovak Roma migrants, identifying processes through which a haunting figure of the Roma migrant emerges across Europe, to argue for more differentiated accounts of continuing and emerging forms of racialisation. It explores how the movement of Roma (whose bodies are marked by their racialised ‘darkness’ in Slovakia) to Britain granted them a temporary escape from this modality of branding while simultaneously exposing them to different categorisations within a re-configuring classificatory matrix. The article develops the concept of ‘migrating racialisation’ in order to empirically trace how historically developed forms of racialisation in Slovakia migrate across Europe through the movement of Roma and non-Roma migrants from Eastern Europe, as well as through particular forms of knowledge circulating within transnational fields constituted not only by Roma migrants themselves but also by various institutions for ‘managing’ or ‘researching’ ‘the Roma’. This concept allows us to analyse how the recent forms of racialisation simultaneously draw on heterogenous histories and nation-state formations, social conditions and sedimented bodily dispositions, which are re-adjusted to new social conditions, discourses and emerging forms of knowledge produced about Roma migrants over the last decade in British and European contexts.     

On the threshold: becoming Romanian Roma,everyday racism and residency rights in transition

ABSTRACT

This article examines the reaction of welfare state actors and ‘Romanian Roma’ migrants to the political environment on migration in the UK. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork between January 2013 and March 2014, the article focuses on how processes of everyday racism infused understandings of the legal framework for European migrants’ residency rights. The article first explores how state actors developed ideas about ‘Romanian Roma families’ as opposed to ‘Romanian-not-Roma families’ in a context marked by pervasive uncertainty about legal entitlements, welfare restructuring and decreasing resources. Second, I draw on new migrants’ accounts to identify their perceptions and understandings of discrimination placed within their previous experiences of racism and state violence. The article argues that processes of racialisation are subtly enfolded into everyday life shaping the narratives through which both welfare state actors and new migrants understand their situated experiences and future plans. The article reveals the small and mundane practices that reproduce racialised hierarchies which maintain the notion of ‘Roma’ as a group with particular proclivities and the affects for their socio-legal status as European migrants in the UK.     

Race science and surveillance: police as the new race scientists

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between race and the urban in the United States through an examination of the role of surveillance – a growing global phenomena in contemporary western cities – and its uses in creating and maintaining boundaries of race, particularly because surveillance of racial and ethnic minority groups tend to be grounded in specific and bounded geographic locations. Using historical evidence and data from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Stop and Frisk program during the 2003–2013 period, this article asks whether or not, strategies of state surveillance of racial and ethnic minority groups should be interpreted as a ‘new’ type of scientific racism given the state’s desire to deploy and its hyper-reliance on technologies to fulfil its surveillance role.     

Critical junctures and transformative events in diaspora mobilisation for Kosovo and Palestinian statehood

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on conflict-generated diasporas has identified the need to consider diaspora mobilisations in multiple contexts and how they are affected by local and global processes. I argue that diasporas react with mobilisations to global events that take place not only in host-states and home-states but also in other locations to which diasporas are transnationally linked. I illustrate the theoretical concepts with empirical discussion about global diaspora activism for Kosovo and Palestinian statehood. Two categories of global events, critical junctures, and transformative events, can be distinguished, with effects on diaspora mobilisation depending on the sociospatial context in which diasporas are embedded. Critical junctures can transform international and state structures and institutions, and change the position of a strategic centre from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’ a homeland territory and vice versa. Transformative events are less powerful and can change diaspora mobilisation trajectories. In contexts where diasporas have relatively strong positionality vis-à-vis other actors in a transnational social field, diaspora mobilisation is more likely to be sustained in response to critical junctures and transformative events.     

‘Having to say everyday … I’m not black enough … I’m not white enough’. Discourses of Aboriginality in the Australian education context

This paper interrogates discourses of Aboriginality about, and by, early career Aboriginal teachers as they negotiate their emergent professional identity in specific Australian school contexts. These discourses position the respondents via their ethnic and cultural background and intersect with self-positioning. This relates to the desire to be positioned as teacher rather than (only) as an ‘Aboriginal’ teacher. Consequently, the over-determination of Aboriginality includes such suppositions as the ‘think-look-do’ Aboriginality with a ‘natural’ connection to community, the ‘good’ Aboriginal teacher who fixes Aboriginal ‘problems’, the Aboriginal teacher as ‘Other’, and [the notion that] ‘Aboriginal work’ as easy, not real work and peripheral to core business. Through qualitative methodology, eleven Aboriginal teachers from the University of Sydney were interviewed. They were able to construct stories of early career teaching and the data was analysed to explore how the participants interpreted, accepted and/or resisted various discourses in their efforts to be agentic and resilient and to make a difference for the Aboriginal students they teach.     

New ethnicities and old classities: respectability and diaspora

This article explores the contrasts between the flexibility and openness of interethnic and diasporic identifications and the fixity of class distinctions in contemporary Britain. The author draws on fieldwork conducted in the Midlands area and a suburban town in the south east of England and traces the ways in which project participants mobilised their biographies and ancestries to express feelings of empathy and relatedness across black, white and Asian identities. The author discovered the same people articulated a strong sense of classed distinction between themselves and others who were thought to lack respectability, social ambition and mobility. These observations have led me to reflect upon the theoretical contrasts between what Stuart Hall has famously called ‘new ethnicities’ and what the author calls ‘old classities’.     

Educators sans frontières? Borders and power geometries in transnational education

ABSTRACT

Education work denotes a relational encounter among individuals positioned along axes of intersecting differences. Transnational education (TNE) offers a particularly intriguing context for conceptualising borders and power relation in knowledge production. Drawing upon empirical work conducted in the UK and Hong Kong, this paper interrogates the notion of border in TNE and analyses how ‘flying faculty’ involved in UK TNE programmes in Hong Kong perceive, manage and experience socio-cultural, institutional and other borders. We contextualise the personal experiences of these ‘educators sans frontières’ in the broader power geometries in which they are embedded. Our findings reveal the presence and strength of diverse borders in the TNE field. These borders are contexts of control and capital accumulation, where existing power relation is being negotiated and contested on a daily basis. We also highlight the rapidly changing power geometries in the field marked by the rise of the new powers, like Hong Kong, in the international higher education system. The paper ends by calling for more appreciation and efforts in harnessing the generative and creative potential of borders. Exploring borders as contexts of exchanges and co-production would contribute to more equitable partnerships among diverse stakeholders in the expanding TNE sector.     

A ‘master status’ or the ‘final straw’? Assessing the role of immigration status in Latino undocumented youths’ pathways out of school

Previous research on undocumented youth and young adults in the United States asserts that immigration status is a ‘master status’, wherein undocumented status overshadows the impact of other social locations. Drawing primarily on interviews with 45 Latina/o undocumented immigrant youth who stopped out of school, I assess whether the ‘master status’ explanation accurately characterises how immigration status shapes undocumented youths’ pathways out of school. Using an intersectional lens, I argue that multiple social locations disrupt educational pathways and set the stage for immigration status to emerge as the ‘final straw’ that pushes undocumented youth to leave school. Specifically, I show how race, class, gender, and first-generation college student status heavily shape undocumented youths’ educational journeys. I find that their resistance to these other forms of marginalisation is weakened by the emerging salience of undocumented status as a severe, relatively insurmountable legal barrier. I highlight the process through which these multiple social locations work together to lead undocumented youth to stop out of school. I contend that using an intersectional lens enhances understandings of how multiple social locations intersect and interact over time to marginalise immigrants.     

Interrogating Mixed-Race: A Crisis of Ambiguity?

In many respects, issues surrounding ‘mixed-race’ identities rupture and dislocate much current thinking within post-race and new ethnicities paradigms. This article seeks to critically engage with what is arguably a marginalized and diverse ‘community’. An evaluation of theories emanating from the UK and USA seeks to challenge hybrid degenerative theories, and more recent attempts at explaining how such identities are negotiated in complex social arenas. What emerges is that some theories are underpinned by static and linear behavioural patterns, which appear oversimplified. Key questions are raised in order to further explore whether ‘mixed-race’ identities are genuinely marginalized and remain ambiguous in a range of physical, social, emotional and ideological contexts. Reflecting upon such issues seeks to prompt questions as to whether there can be a more sophisticated and sensitive understanding of the unique experiences (both positive and negative) of ‘mixed-race’ individuals. By doing so, it is hoped that such a topic becomes more central to considerations of how prejudice and discrimination operate across and within a wide variety of settings.     

An ‘undeliberate determinacy’? The changing migration strategies of Polish migrants in the UK in times of Brexit

This paper reformulates classical questions regarding the plans and strategies of Polish migrants in the UK – such as decisions to leave or remain in the host country, or be ‘deliberately indeterminate’ about future plans – from a sociologically situated ‘rights-based’ perspective. This approach considers migrants’ attitudes towards specific ‘civic integration’ measures in a medium-term time frame, as well as in the new context created by the UK’s vote to leave the EU. Based on the quantitative analysis of original survey data, we investigate the factors behind Polish migrants’ migration strategies, and we argue that basic socio-economic and demographic factors are inadequate, on their own terms, to explain future migration and civic integration plans. Instead, we find that aspects such as interest in and awareness of one’s rights, as well as anxieties about the ability to maintain one’s rights in the future are stronger determinants.     

‘Did queer Muslims even exist?’ – racialised grids of intelligibility in Swedish LGBTQ contexts

ABSTRACT

This article explores racialised grids of intelligibility around gender identity and sexuality in white Swedish LGBTQ contexts. By analysing personal stories shared on a separatist Instagram account by and for LGBTQ people racialised as non-white and/or Muslim, the article identifies some of the predominant narratives through which they become intelligible, both to other people and to themselves. Four frameworks are particularly recurring: the notion of them being victims of a ‘hateful other’, strong expectations to come out, exotification and tokenism (both sexualised and otherwise), and a general lack of representation. I argue that all of these revolve around notions of LGBTQ people racialised as non-white and/or Muslim as never quite belonging and thus never quite recognisable. They are instead frequently situated between white, gender-equal and LGBTQ-friendly ‘Swedishness’ and threatening, LGBTQ-phobic racialised ‘others’, made intelligible only in relation to either of these.     

Reframing national locality: religious minorities using history to transform local experience in Georgia

In the Republic of Georgia, Baptists are marginalized minorities vis-à-vis the powerful Georgian Orthodox Church. In recent years, Baptists have adopted ‘culturally relevant’ reforms, incorporating Orthodox symbols and sensibilities into worship and administration. These reforms also include the deployment of a historical narrative identifying them as authentic members of the ostensibly Orthodox national community. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Georgian Baptists, I investigate how they use history to constitute new frames for interpreting themselves as appropriate to local contexts. Revising their history has helped constitute a viable national identity by ‘localizing’ Baptist faith and experience in the Georgian Orthodox milieu.