The multiethnic state-building dilemma: national and ethnic minorities' identities in the Crimea

This article examines the process of national identity formation among ethnic minorities in the Crimea – specifically, how a new common identity develops in the system of existing identities, what meaning group identities have for different minorities group and how this process influences attitudes and stereotypes toward the ingroup and outgroup. Based on surveys in the Crimea, results show that formation of a common national and regional identity leads to developing of positive stereotypes toward members of other groups, who now are involved in a new group identity, but also is connected with formation of negative attitudes and stereotypes toward other groups. The meaning of identity depends on its position in the system of identities and can be used as a criterion for early warning of conflicts.     

Attitudes to immigrants in South Africa: personality and vulnerability

While many countries across the world face increasing numbers of immigrants, the literature on attitudes to foreigners and immigrants focuses on Western countries. This article tests broad insights from Western countries in a specific non-Western context – South Africa, a country marked by sporadic violence against some immigrant groups. This provides an important validity check. Data from the 2013 South African Social Attitudes Survey and the 2013 World Value Survey are used to model attitudes to immigrants. In line with research on Western countries, individual personality is associated with differences in attitudes; people in vulnerable positions and those who lack a personal support mechanism are more likely to oppose immigrants. When implemented to reflect the specific context, research on attitudes to immigrants appears to generalise to non-Western contexts.     

‘I feel myself to be a world citizen’: negotiating Turkish and Alevi identity in Melbourne

The complexity and heterogeneity of modern multicultural societies can both highlight and obscure the diversity which exists within identity groups. Whilst the majority of the Turkish community in Melbourne are Sunni Muslim, significant groups of ethnically, religiously and linguistically different communities also exist. Recent research with women who participate in activities at the Alevi community centre in Melbourne has brought to light many of the issues which are faced by individuals who are doubly excluded from the mainstream of Australian life and culture as migrants and from the mainstream of Turkish diasporic life through a non-Sunni Islamic religious orientation. For some, but not all of these women there is also an added dimension of difference through embracing their Kurdish ethnicity and linguistic background. Both first and second generation Alevi women use a range of strategies to locate themselves within what one respondent called the ‘rose garden’ of Australia since the advent of immigrant diversity.     

Multicultural education: the state of play from an Australian perspective

This article reports on the first comprehensive survey of public school teachers in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) around issues of multicultural and English as Second Language (ESL) education. While there is substantial literature on multicultural education – what it should and shouldn’t be – there is much that is left unexplored in research in the area, not least of which is the characteristics of the teaching labour force. In this article, we ‘take stock’ of multicultural education, not by engaging with philosophical debates about multiculturalism as an ethical or policy practice, but as an auditing of what exists in the name of multicultural education. Drawing on a sample of over 5000 respondents, the article documents the changing cultural profile of the profession and highlights gaps in pre-service training and professional learning of teachers in terms of meeting the needs of Australia’s increasingly culturally and linguistically complex school populations.     

新中国成立后新疆族际通婚政策的演变

新疆地方政府在不同历史时期对族际通婚的态度有所不同。新中国成立以后,族际通婚政策经历了一个由限制到禁止再到慎重考虑,由以整体利益为先到以个人感情为主的变化过程。政策的制定体现出政府对民族关系的特殊重视。     

‘Our own Hurricane Katrina’: Aboriginal disadvantage and Australian national identity

Since Prime Minister Howard's declaration in 2007 that child sex abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities was Australia's ‘own Hurricane Katrina’, the trope of natural disaster has been a regular feature of print and television media coverage of Indigenous affairs in Australia. The effect of this rhetorical strategy is to separate what happens to Aboriginal people from the fabric of ‘mainstream’ Australian cultural and political life; to render it alien and unconnected to the relative privilege enjoyed by other Australians. This strategy also produces peculiar temporal effects by erecting a cordon sanitaire around Australian history and the national identity that it supports. Howard's comparison of Aboriginal disadvantage with Katrina, if read alongside his politicization of the teaching of Australian history, demonstrates an unwillingness to incorporate systemic injustice toward Indigenous people within the composition of that history. This article interrogates the relationships between the manifold understandings of Aboriginal disadvantage and attempts to commemorate its violent history, as these aspects of Australian life are both integrated and refused by national identity narratives. Specifically, the paper reinterprets the trope of natural disaster as a means of comprehending Indigenous disadvantage and Australian identity by drawing on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. Benjamin's understanding of activism as a constructive retrieval of the past will be developed to reconnect catastrophe to history, and to enable an exploration of responsibility for that history as an integral condition of contemporary Australian identity.     

Rethinking the nation: Apology,treaty and reconciliation in Australia

In February 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Indigenous Australians for past injustices. The apology was presented as a turning point in the history of the nation. According to Rudd, ‘there comes a time in the history of a nation when peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future’. The apology marked a new step in the reconciliation process in Australia, but as this article argues, the treaty issue – another controversial aspect of reconciliation – remains a major challenge to the Australian nation.     

Desire for the desert: racialising white teachers’ motives for working in remote schools in the Australian desert

Abstract

Distinct from rurality, the Australian desert has long functioned as a signifier of remoteness in the dominant imagination; a product of spatialised binary relations between ‘progressive’ (white) mainstream or idealised white countryside, and disordered/dangerous Aboriginal periphery. Remoteness constitutes a complex racial dynamic that has historically mediated white teachers’ and missionaries’ desires to travel to the social margins. This article adopts a discursive understanding of remoteness to examine contemporary white teachers’ decisions to work in Aboriginal schools in the desert – decisions that are often articulated through unwitting recourse to the ‘three Ms’ or ‘tourist’. The article explores these identity constructs and how they enable different performances of whiteness. It examines how white people’s desires are often covertly raced but does not however, position the teacher as a priori racist. Rather, desire is theorised as a social construct in which subjects invest, which may at times contribute toward processes of decolonisation. This rendering moves beyond a logic of individualism and underpins the argument that recognising how these dynamics play out is vital with respect to understanding the place of white teachers inside remote Indigenous Education. Moreover, such insights are valuable for appreciating how whiteness continues to be reproduced in White Australia under a guise of good intentions.     

Ethnic composition of the school class and interethnic attitudes: a multi-group perspective

This study investigates the relationship between the ethnic classroom composition and interethnic attitudes of adolescents of the native majority and several ethnic minorities in the Netherlands, Germany, England and Sweden. It contributes to prior research by examining the underlying theoretical features of contact opportunities and levels of threat across multiple ethnic groups more accurately, using group-specific measures. Based on Intergroup Contact Theory and Ethnic Group Conflict Theory, contrasting hypotheses on how the ethnic classroom composition affects out-group and in-group attitudes of adolescents are tested with multilevel regression analyses. Across ethnic groups and countries, we consistently find a moderate to substantial relation between ethnic classroom composition and interethnic attitudes in line with Intergroup Contact Theory: a relatively larger out-group size, compared to the in-group, relates positively to out-group attitudes. At the same time, in several cases, a relatively larger in-group size relates to more positive in-group attitudes. The findings point to the significance of balanced ethnic classroom compositions for promoting favourable attitudes between multiple ethnic groups – benefitting especially those who face high levels of prejudice from others and those who are prejudiced towards others – without compromising positive in-group attitudes.     

Pride and prejudice: opposing constructions of mixed race in Australia

ABSTRACT

In the Australian context, the development of a ‘situated politics of mixedness’ is complicated by the fact that there are (at least) two main categories of mixed race populations – the Indigenous and the migrant/settler. For those with mixed Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal ancestries, and those with mixed White and other migrant ancestries, life chances and identities differ significantly. This paper outlines some of these differences using the trope of pride and prejudice. For those of mixed migrant/settler heritage, evidence is growing that the mixed experience is predominantly one of pride. For them, misrecognition, or being asked about their racial background, is an opportunity for play, often resulting in ‘the big reveal’ of a valorised mixed identity associated with something other than a bland ‘white bread’ Australian-ness. For those of mixed Indigenous heritage however, there remains a significant level of prejudice, not (only) for being Aboriginal, but for not being visibly Aboriginal enough. Using existing studies and a number of media controversies as examples, this paper interrogates the implications of these differences for understandings of the ways in which race is recruited in the construction of legitimate identity claims. It asks particularly how ‘mixed race’ is helpful analytically to describe the identity constructions within these two very different experiences.     

The Muslim Question in Australia: Islamophobia and Muslim Alienation

Islamophobia has become a significant problem across the Western world. Australia is no exception. The emergence of far right groups and a political environment that allows anti-Islamic discourse has created an increasingly unwelcome environment for Muslims, even though multiculturalism has long been a fundamental marker of Australian daily life. The rise of Islamophobia has been damaging to Australia. This paper explores the rise of anti-Islamic sentiments in Australia and the increasing marginalization of Muslim youth, showing that Islamophobia not only breaks the bond between Muslim youth and Australian society, it also polarizes relations within Australian Muslim communities.     

White Australian identities and Indigenous land rights

Land has been central to debates about the relationship between Indigenous (First Nations) and non-Indigenous Australian identities since colonial violence founded the nation. How do white Australians understand Indigenous land rights? This paper draws on an empirical ethnographic study with rural people who self-identify as ‘white Australian’ to analyze the key discourses of land, identity and nation and the complexities of how whiteness and race is socially produced and lived in rural Australia. The study found that white Australian discourses of nation and identity limit most of the respondents' ability to construct their identity in relation to Indigenous sovereignty.     

The social distance of Poles to other minorities: a study of four cities in Germany and Britain

This contribution investigates the social distance of immigrants from Poland in four Western European cities – London, Birmingham, Berlin and Munich – particularly Polish immigrants’ distance towards members of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities in their various social roles. Presenting unique data from the first wave of a longitudinal qualitative study, we first discuss the differential levels of social distance that Polish immigrants place between themselves and members of minority groups in each city. We find that respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics impact their social distance, but their education and occupation may have less of an effect than their place of origin in Poland or current place of residence and work. Moreover, these factors work differentially across the four cities. After analysing social distance with respect to three dimensions of difference – ethnicity, religion and sexuality – we find several different social-distancing mechanisms. Ultimately, we argue that social science needs to consider regional and local contexts in which social attitudes towards minorities are acquired and exercised. Similarly, we need to reflect on the group’s presumed homogeneity and on the unifying visions of the ‘host society’ as a site of migrants’ incorporation.     

Beauty as violence: ‘beautiful’ hair and the cultural violence of identity erasure

Curious observations of hair and hairstyles worn by many women of Black African descent reveal the triumph of a Eurocentric dominant ideology of beauty. I assert in this study that the process of attaining the hegemonic ideology of ‘beautiful’ hair, often defined as a European and Asian texture and style of hair, is a violent journey. This study draws largely from Johan Galtung's seminal theoretical works on violence, particularly his articulation of cultural violence as a creation of ideology through psychological process of indoctrination and brainwashing, and the internalization of this process. From this theoretical framing, and a demythologization of the multiplicity and flexibility narrative of postmodern self and identity, this study examines the attitudes of young Black South African women toward their natural hair and their perception of ‘beautiful’ hair. Through a survey of 159 Black female students in a rural South African university with a predominantly Black student population, and face-to-face conversations with five female students, the study asserts that many Black African women's relationship with their hair is shaped by violence. The physical and cultural violence perpetuated in the quest for ‘beautiful’ hair is consequently creating a generational cycle of identity erasure.     

Shame and pride in second-generation German identity in Melbourne,Australia: emotions and white ethnicity

As members of an established, well-integrated, white ethnic group, second-generation Germans are largely invisible in Australian society. Given this, they are easily presumed a group for whom Gans’ notion of ‘symbolic ethnicity’ might apply. However, based on interviews with adult children of German immigrants in Melbourne, Australia, this article suggests an alternative interpretation using recent literature on the role of emotions for identity. In the interviews with adult children of German immigrants in Melbourne, Australia, the notions of shame and pride in relation to ethnic identity were clearly evident. Shame often emerged in interaction with other people in Australia, and particularly in relation to Nazism and the Second World War. However, most respondents felt equally proud of their German heritage, particularly later in life. These findings suggest that ethnic identity for these second-generation Germans is a deeper, embodied experience that is similar to what Bourdieu terms habitus.     

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.     

Student-workers and tourist-workers as urban labour: temporalities and identities in the Australian cosmopolitan city

ABSTRACT

Ethnic and cultural difference have long been regularly encountered and produced in Australian cities. However, these processes have predominantly been understood through the lens of permanent ‘settler’ migration. Recent migration policies are seeing increasing numbers of transnational workers residing in Australia with various noncitizen statuses and uncertain temporal horizons. Among these are student-workers and tourist-workers, who, although constructed through transient mobilities of education and leisure travel, play increasingly important roles in Australian cities as migrant labour. Drawing on fieldwork with student-workers and tourist-workers in Melbourne and Sydney, this paper seeks to examine how the temporal and legal status of these mobile subjects is entangled in complex ways with particular sites of production, consumption and labour within the cosmopolitan urban environment. It looks in particular at how the identities of student-workers and tourist-workers are constructed through specific temporal and spatial boundaries within urban space as well as how they are implicated within hierarchies of labour and spaces of cosmopolitan consumption. This highlights some of the complex socio-spatial relationships between and citizen and noncitizen subjects both within and across ethnic boundaries in the cosmopolitan city.     

‘Mixed’ Japanese-Filipino identities under Japanese multiculturalism

ABSTRACT

The ways in which multiculturalism is debated and practiced forms an important frame for ‘mixed’ ethnic identities to take shape. In this paper, I explore how young migrants of Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ parentage make sense of their ethnic identities in Japan. My key findings are that dominant discourses constructing the Japanese nation as a monoracial, monolingual and monoethnic nation leave no space for diversity within the definition of ‘Japanese’, creating the necessity for alternative labels like haafu or ‘mixed roots’. Japanese multiculturalism does not provide alternative narratives of Japaneseness but preserves the myth of Japanese racial homogeneity by recognizing diversity while maintaining ethnic and racial boundaries. Lastly, these categories have not been actively questioned by my respondents. Rather, they show flexibility in adopting these various labels – haafu, ‘mixed roots’, Filipino, Firipin-jin – in different contexts.     

‘Really really different different’: rurality,regional schools and refugees

Abstract

This article explores the dynamics of difference-making in a regional Australian town. Despite Australia’s high levels of cultural diversity, many rural and regional areas remain predominantly ‘white’ spaces, presided over by people of Anglo-Celtic ancestry but with small populations of indigenous Australians. Over the past decade, however, a growing number of regional centres have become home to refugees from a range of African, Middle Eastern and South-East Asian countries. This study draws on interview, observational and documentary data to shed light on the experiences of people in one such town, focusing on schools as sites of everyday social contact and significant mediators of identity formation and settlement outcomes. A key aim of the article is to illuminate the ways in which constructions of rurality and of difference intersect with local histories and resources to shape relations between the original, ‘old’ and newest settlers.     

The struggle of autonomy and authenticity: framing the savage refugee

James Hathaway has described refugee law as ‘fundamentally oriented to the promotion of autonomy’. Borrowed from the Kantian roots of liberal rights theory, this theme has come to the fore as refugee advocates decry increasingly draconian experiments in deflection and deterrence. But what exactly does it mean for a refugee to exercise autonomy? And how is it connected to that other popular refrain – that those who arrive irregularly by boat in Australia, despite high recognition rates, are not ‘genuine’ refugees? By examining the assumptions underpinning autonomy as a contemporary political value, and working within the theoretical construct that identifies a state's ‘recognition’ of autonomy with authenticity, this article explores tensions within both public discourse on refugees and the discipline of refugee law itself. It considers how and why the refugee exercising ‘authentic’ moral agency by boarding a boat is depicted not just as a threat, but as inherently irrational (and thus not ‘authentically’ autonomous) and less ‘genuine’ (and thus virtuous) than the ‘passive’ refugee languishing in a camp overseas, awaiting ‘our’ redemptive touch. Finally, it asks whether refugee law similarly suffers from the contradictory moral promise of human rights law which places autonomy at its heart while in practice requiring that humanity be split between victim, savage and redeemer.