The rise of the second generation: aspirations,motivations and academic success of Chinese immigrants’ children in Hong Kong

The second-generation immigrants’ advantage in education has been observed in many destination countries, and often explained in terms of their family values and practices embedded with certain culture and positive selection on psychological factors. However, the roles of culture and selectivity have been hardly disentangled from each other. In this article, we examine the self-selection hypothesis in the context of Hong Kong, as its unique setting enables us to largely control for the effect of cultural factors and focus on the positive selection effect. We identify four psychological traits that could contribute to immigrants’ outstanding performance, and employ mediation analysis to investigate how much of the effect of immigrant status on academic achievement is mediated through these factors. Analysis of data from the Programme for International Student Assessment in Hong Kong reveals that, having strong motivations to find a better life and high aspirations for upward mobility can largely explain Chinese immigrant children’s academic success in Hong Kong, with educational aspiration playing a particularly important role. In addition, the net academic advantage of second-generation immigrants is larger among low socio-economic status (SES) families, and low SES immigrant parents have exceptionally high expectation and great dedication to their children’s education.     

Crossing borders in initial teacher education: mapping dispositions to diversity and inequity

In this article, we share a study focused on engaging teacher candidates with multiple forms of diversity and inequity to study emerging patterns of dispositions. Our primary concern is in understanding the processes through which societal inequity becomes reconstituted through teacher education. Our study attempts to deepen discourses of ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ in education, to consider the ways teacher candidates relate to broader systems of power and global and local inequities through their role as educators. Inspired by both decolonial and Western critical theories, we frame this as research that seeks ‘otherwise’ as we invite teacher candidates to ‘cross borders’ to what is ‘other’ to themselves. In this article, we share our study’s priorities, methods, methodological/theoretical framework, data analysis and findings. Our findings identify a significant gap between the priorities of social equity to which teacher candidates state they commit and the educational practices that would affirm those commitments.     

How critical is the event? Multicultural Norway after 22 July 2011

It is commonly assumed that insecurity experienced by citizens in the wake of a terror attack gives rise to public demands for strong countermeasures, which political leaders must respond to. This article asks how Norwegian society was affected by the 22 July 2011 attacks against the government office complex in Oslo and Labour Party youth camp on Utøya. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, it analyses political impact, examining post-22 July public debates and related policymaking. A dataset of newspaper op-eds and commentaries was created to determine the significance of key issues debated in the print media after the attacks, and changes over time in the intensity of debates. Key issues were then followed up in a qualitative analysis of policy implications. The study further investigated the discursive framing of the attacks, and the problems and possible solutions evoked in the debates. Was this a ‘critical event’ as Veena Das has theorised, bringing about new sorts of action through the reworking of traditional categories, codes or meanings? Public security emerges as the key frame within which the 22 July attacks have been debated. Arguments over police reforms and alleged inaction by authorities stand out as the most lasting debate.     

The microfoundations of diaspora politics: unpacking the state and disaggregating the diaspora

ABSTRACT

Recognising the need to unpack ?the ‘state’ and? ?problematise? the term? ‘diaspora’, in this special issue we examine the various actors within (and beyond) the state that participate in the design and implementation of diaspora policies, as well as the mechanisms through which ???diasporas?? are constructed by governments, political parties, diaspora entrepreneurs, or international organisations?. Ex??tant theories are often hard-pressed to capture the empirical variation and often end up identifying ‘exceptions’. We?? theorise these ‘exceptions’ through three interrelated? conceptual moves: First, ??we focus on? ??underst?udie?d? aspects of the relationships between states as well as organised non-state actors and their citizens or co-ethnics? abroad (??or at home – in cases of return migration).? Second, ??we? ??examine dyads of ?origin states and specific diasporic communities differentiated by time of emigration, place of residence, socio-economic status, migratory status, generation, or skills. T?hird??,? ?we ?consider? migration in its multiple spatial and temporal phases (emigration, immigration, transit, return??)? and ?how the???y?? inter?sect to?? constitute diasporic identities?? and policies. ??These? conceptual moves contribute to comparative research in the field and allow us to identify the mechanisms? connect?ing structural variable??s with ? specific policies by states ?(and other actors?) as well as responses? by the relevant ?diasporic ?communi?ties??.     

Race still matters: preparing culturally relevant teachers

This qualitative study explores racial identity development of teacher candidates during a teacher preparation program dedicated to preparing teachers for diverse classrooms. Two black teacher candidates in the US demonstrate their racial identity development through critical reflections offered throughout the program. Findings suggest that teachers’ racial identities shaped their constructions of culturally relevant (CR) pedagogy. Implications for teacher education programs include considering how the development of CR pedagogues is influenced by teacher candidates’ racial identities and experiences.     

Critical Race Theory,policy rhetoric and outcomes: the case of Muslim schools in Britain

The expansion of state-funded Muslim schools in Britain since 1998 has developed against a backdrop of sustained public political rhetoric around the wider position of British Muslims in both political and educational contexts. This article explores the public policy rhetoric around Muslim schools under New Labour and the subsequent Coalition and Conservative governments and compares how these narratives align with outcomes in terms of numbers of, and types of, denominational Muslim faith schools in Britain. The article applies a Critical Race Theory approach based on the construction of counter-narrative through a critical analysis of policy and its outcomes. This analysis is contextualised through exploring the implications of counter-terror strategies such as Prevent for the political and educational equity of British Muslims as stakeholders in the state. Against this context the article explores the extent to which successive policy frameworks and political narratives around faith schooling have played out in terms of denominational state-funded Muslim schools. Whilst gains have been made under New Labour and the successive Coalition and Conservative governments, critical analysis reveals that public policy narratives allow for a misleading account of the extent to which Muslim communities have been enfranchised through state funding for Islamic schools.     

Hiding within racial hierarchies: how undocumented immigrants make residential decisions in an American city

In the United States, the residential segregation of Latinos from whites has persisted but has fallen between Latinos and blacks. Demographers offer the size of the Latino population that is undocumented as one potential explanation for these patterns. However, little work has examined undocumented immigrants’ first-hand accounts of residential decision-making. Drawing on interviews with undocumented-headed, Latin American-origin families in Dallas, Texas, we explore how lacking legal status relates to residential selection. We find that some undocumented families perceive certain neighbourhoods to be ‘off-limits’, not only because of financial constraints, explicit legal impediments to their tenure, or individual racial preferences, but also because they perceive them as high-risk: Most sample households agree that law enforcement patrols areas with white majorities in order to exclude Latinos and, specifically, the undocumented. As a strategy to minimise the perceived risk law enforcement poses to their families’ stability, some undocumented families in the study report opting into neighbourhoods with Latino majorities in order to ‘blend in’, whereas others describe feeling safe in neighbourhoods with black majorities where they can ‘hide in plain sight’. We demonstrate how undocumented families’ perceptions of law enforcement in neighbourhoods with differing racial compositions may partly underlie trends in residential selection and stratification.     

The roles of social housing providers in creating ‘integrated’ communities

ABSTRACT

Cohesion and integration agendas in Britain can be characterised by localisation of ‘race relations’ responsibilities and the importance of local institutions in shaping neighbourhoods has been acknowledged. However, little is understood about the roles of housing providers in integration initiatives. Indeed, research on housing and race has experienced a lull in the 2000s. Thus, this paper aims to examine how social housing providers negotiate their positions and are complicit in constructing a certain vision of community. It draws on interviews from the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE)’s work in the ethnically diverse neighbourhoods of Cheetham Hill (Manchester), Newham (London), Butetown (Cardiff) and Pollokshields and Govanhill (Glasgow). The paper makes three arguments: first, that race and ethnicity as facets of ‘integration’ have been subsumed into broader agendas, yet remain implicit in community building; second, that housing organisation practices are often detached from local meanings of community and prioritise exclusionary activities focusing on behaviour change and, third, that the roles of housing organisations in constructing ‘integrated’ communities are highly variable and localised, influenced by the history and contemporary dynamics of place.     

Ethnicity as skill: immigrant employment hierarchies in Norwegian low-wage labour markets

Immigrants are often concentrated in particular, often low-waged, segments of the labour market and employers tend to assume that immigrants posit (soft) skills which make them particularly suited for specific tasks. Less scholarly attention has been given to the real and perceived content of these skills and how employers may shift their view over time. We contribute to the literature by examining changing ethnic employment hierarchies in two immigrant-intensive labour markets in Norway. Drawing on qualitative data from the hotel and fish processing industries, we describe, first, how different ethnic groups are allocated into specific jobs forming a clear hierarchy in the eyes of employers, and, second, how employers’ preferences for particular groups change as new immigrants enter the labour market. Theoretically, we develop the concept of ‘ethnicity as skill’, which points to the tendency among employers to equate ethnic group membership with a set of informal qualifications.     

Care-full failure: how auxiliary assistance to poor Roma migrant women in Spain compounds marginalization

ABSTRACT

In Spain, the national and local authorities boast in recent years about their progressive programs for the integration of Roma migrants from Romania. Many state efforts to work with Roma on their integration are specifically directed at women. Economic integration into the waged labor market is considered a major goal as it, supposedly, leads to the empowerment of Roma migrant women while also securing decent standards of living for entire families. This article argues that integration programs adversely result in the further discrimination and exclusion of those they pretend to relief. This adverse result is produced through a two-tier intervention in the lives of Roma families. The caring state works with a general category of ‘vulnerability’ for targeting populations, in which Roma migrant women are specifically incorporated through designated social programs. The performance of Roma as the subject–object of these programs is carefully evaluated. According to these evaluations, Roma women often fail to meet the normative standards of ‘good mothers’, ‘decent wives’, and ‘diligent workers’. Subsequently, to deal with ‘failing subjects’, the disciplining state, a-la Foucault, inflicts an array of penalties on Roma women and their families: cut-offs of social benefits, evictions from poor dwellings, withdrawal of children’s custody, and forced removals to Romania. We thus argue that initiatives by the caring state (and civil society) often prescribe or go hand-in-hand with repression from the correcting state. In welfare states, social programs can thus conclusively ‘evidence’ existing stereotypes about marginalized Roma families and about women in particular.     

Resistance and Assimilation: Transforming Security Roles of China’s Largest Muslim Minorities

China’s resurgence as an economic power has brought it increased interconnectivity to international global markets, and with it, increased exposure to transnational crimes. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the resulting increase in religious-inspired terrorist attacks have been of particular concern for the Chinese leadership. This paper aims to highlight the processes of resistance and assimilation of China’s two largest Muslim minorities, the Hui and Uyghur, in successive Chinese Empires since the eighth century CE and how critical events in the past two decades have affected the way in which the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has approached relations with its Muslim minority communities. The purpose is two-fold: to expose these groups’ stabilizing and destabilizing influence throughout the 1300 years of Muslim-Chinese coexistence, and to assess the effectiveness of the Chinese Communist Party’s Policies towards its Muslim minorities.     

Female employment following childbirth: differences between native and immigrant women in Switzerland

This paper analyses how native and immigrant women adapt their labour supply soon after childbirth in Switzerland. The analysis aims to examine whether the heterogeneity in post-birth female employment is explained by differences by women's origin with respect to skills composition, occupational attainment and household financial situation. Using 2010–2015 panel data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey, multinomial models focus on the transitions experienced by employed women from t?1 (one year prior) to different levels of labour-market involvement in t (reference week) after childbirth (which occurs when a woman has a child of less than one year of age in t). Three possible outcomes are considered: same/more working hours, fewer working hours, and withdrawal from employment. Double hurdle models are also used to account for the total amount of hours worked by those women who remain in employment after childbirth. In post-birth employment patterns, a larger positive effect of women's opportunity cost, measured through educational attainment and previous job characteristics, than of partners’ income, is observed, especially for immigrant women.     

Fratricide identities: the land conflict between indigenous Leco and peasant unions in Apolo,Bolivia

This article explores processes of identity-building and claims-making by rural social groups in the context of recent multicultural and plurinational reforms in Bolivia, focusing on an analysis of the narrative apparatus that underpins a paradigmatic land conflict between an indigenous organization and a peasant union in the Bolivian Amazon. The institutional shift that characterized the country after Evo Morales’ election has been reflected and absorbed at the local level. Here, however, the new claims for recognition cannot be understood only through the –often abused – lenses of ‘resistance struggle’, ‘cultural oppression’ and ‘political discrimination of minorities’. In fact, these claims are the result of a complex interaction between institutional changes, and social actors’ ability to respond to them, proposing powerful narratives that provide society and individuals with new shared meanings and mechanisms of self-identification.     

Multi-level governance and migration politics in the Arab world: the case of Syria’s displacement

ABSTRACT

In the context of Syria’s displacement, supranational ‘migration governors’ in the Arab region have sought – in different forms and capacities – to devise initiatives for responsibility sharing and to reinforce the capacity of Syria’s Arab neighbours to deal with refugee inflows. While the case of Syria’s displacement has witnessed the proliferation of collaborative networks, institutional complexity has yielded low effectiveness for the governance of such large-scale displacement in Syria’s neighbourhood. Supranational bodies have formulated dissonant frameworks and agendas. In the context of securitised responses to displacement, the discourse has not reflected the realities of refugee assistance and protection. Multi-level policy frameworks need to be embedded in the region’s geopolitical field of migration governance and refugee protection. While colliding policy arenas are to be grounded within the region’s historical trajectory of migration politics, an understanding of their effects requires gaining an insight into how they have interacted with the various refugee-hosting Arab states, influenced their refugee discourse, and impacted the issue of refugee assistance and protection on the ground.     

How cities shape refugee centres: ‘deservingness’ and ‘good aid’ in a Sicilian town

While scholars have devoted increasing attention to the dynamics at play within refugee centres, analyses have often been driven by the ‘exceptionality’ of these institutions, overlooking the ways in which what happens inside the centres is largely connected to what goes on outside of them. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in a Sicilian refugee centre and the surrounding town, this paper investigates the extent to which economic, historical and political configurations inform how local actors conceptualise aid and how they interact with refugees on a daily basis. Overall, the study found that both centre workers and the general population mobilise moral arguments that can only be understood in light of dynamics that are external to the centre itself. These findings ultimately point to the extent to which state-level dysfunctions influence popular images of what a ‘deserving’ refugee might look like as well as local understandings of the ‘right way’ of providing help.     

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.     

Thinking through the flesh: a critical autoethnography of racial body politics in urban teacher education

Although the ubiquitous nature of whiteness has been scrutinized in research on teacher preparation in the United States, scholarship on how this concept impinges upon the field’s overall culture, as well as on pedagogy, is scarce. Thus, I perform a critical autoethnographic study on the relationships among whiteness, pedagogy, and urban teacher education. The inquiry threads Critical Race Theory and feminist theorizing on (Black) bodies, affects, and assemblages, and extends from extant literature illustrating that the dichotomous thinking characteristic of whiteness undergirds the disembodied approaches to teaching and learning prevalent in teacher education programs. This, I discover, leaves one White pre-service teacher ill-equipped to discern and disrupt the materialization of whiteness in an (inter)corporeal encounter with a Black youth in an urban classroom. Additionally, a pedagogy of disembodiment hinders this pre-service teacher from developing robust understandings of how latent within his lived-in, socio-historically situated White body is the potent potential to exacerbate the psychic pain that racism inflicts upon the racially othered children and youth who navigate urban classrooms under the scorching glare of whiteness. These findings underpin my call for urban teacher educators to embrace a pedagogy of embodiment in order to build pre-service teachers’ capacities to teach racially marginalized children and youth in ways that broaden the boundaries of the human beyond the scope of whiteness.     

The local turn in migration management: the IOM and the engagement of local authorities

Migration management subsumes a set of discourses and institutions that aim to coordinate states’ regulation of international migration. However, this paradigm is increasingly recognising the importance of the local scale and its actors. This ‘local turn’ in migration management underlines the necessity for local actors to adapt in order to gain resilience to migration shocks. Grounded theoretically in the Cultural Political Economy approach, this paper examines how the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is trying to engage local actors in a neoliberal spatio-temporal arrangement. This arrangement reduces the complexity of migration by apprehending the global as the domain of relentless migration flows and the local as a field where pragmatic and partnership-based solutions can be implemented by local actors. To illustrate this arrangement, this paper focuses on the 2015 IOM’s Conference on Migrants and Cities which gathered representatives from local authorities. This conference is an attempt to semiotically and extra-semiotically steer local migration policies. And through an analysis of the opening speech of the Director General of the IOM, this paper explores how this event offers local actors appropriate models of perception, (inter)action and being.     

四川少数民族村寨旅游扶贫模式转变研究

In 2012 , State Ethnic Affairs Com-mission of the People’ s Republic of China( hereaf-ter SEAC ) announced an outline concerning the protection and development of‘ethnic minority vil-lages with special characteristics ’ . The develop-ment of such villages is one of the important tasks of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission:this devel-opment aims to foster the conservation of ethnic culture and to accelerate the development of the ethnic areas in which these villages lie. On Sep-tember 23 , 2014 , the State Ethnic Affairs Com-mission announced guanyu minming shoupi zhong-guo shaoshu minzu tese chunzhai de tongzhi ( No-tice on the Naming of the First Group of China ’ s Ethnic Minority Villages with Special Characteris-tics):340 villages in total were inscribed into the list of this so-called ‘First Batch ’ , among which four villages of Sichuan province were included:( i) Jiefang village of Haqu in Leshan, ( ii) Mutuo Village of Maoxian in Aba, ( iii) Shangmo Village of Songfan in Aba, and ( iv) Guza Village of Seda in Ganzi. With the support of the so-called‘Poverty Al-leviation Policy’ , tourism in ethnic minority villa-ges has been booming; however, this has also re-sulted in a new series of related problems that need to be addressed. Tourism development obviously had reduced regional poverty. Since the 1980s, the promotion of economic development through tourism in the ethnic areas ( with a corresponding improvement of people ’ s living conditions ) has been widely accepted by society. Also in the prov-ince of Sichuan the ‘poverty alleviation through tourism’ policy has led to economic growth and has reduced the poverty of the people in the ethnic mi-nority areas. From 2011 to 2014, the SEAC has invested 57. 8 million Yuan in the development of ethnic minority villages in Sichuan province. This has led to the implementation of 73 projects and has benefited around 100,000 people, 7 indige-nous ethnic groups, and 11 prefectures and munic-ipalities in Sichuan. It seems that this‘poverty al-leviation through tourism ’ ( hereafter PATT ) has resulted in good economic and social effects. Ethnic minority villages in Sichuan share sim-ilar challenges: ( i) a low level of production and productivity,economic backwardness, simplistic e-conomic infrastructure, cultural narrow-minded-ness, a low level of education and personal devel-opment, and a fragile condition of local nature and cultural surroundings. Moreover, tourism has since deeply altered previous development models for these regions: this has also brought many new problems, like e. g. how to correctly distribute the newly acquired economic benefits and profits, as well as cultural and environmental protection is-sues. Many of these problems seem to be only tran-sitional;however, these challenges do ask for the necessary tweaks of the PATT policies. This article thus tries to review the model of PATT as imple-mented in the ethnic villages of Sichuan. The arti-cle explores its different stages/aspects:( i) adap-tation of goals, ( ii) the changing role of the gov-ernment, ( iii) an evolving profit model for local people, and ( iv ) evolving local talent discovery and activation. The first aspect of PATT is the change of the development goals. At first, the priority is to get rid of poverty through tourism. To initially boost local tourism, the government must make major in-vestments: enhancement of the basic infrastruc-ture, creation of a touristic brand and initial adver-tising for the ethnic villages. However, when the PATT has been effectively implemented, and reached a mature stage of development, i. e. the village has become relatively popular and annual numbers of tourists have reached a stable good lev-el, the goals must be adapted: economic develop-ment should change to sustainable development. The new goals would be a combination of local tourism and local related industries, such as handi-craft products, catering and other hospitality busi-nesses etc. When all of this takes place, the eth-nic villages and areas seem to be able to arrive at a green and sustainable development path. The second stage is the change of the role of government. As said, in the beginning large in-vestments in infrastructure, tourism marketing and publicity are needed. In this start-up stage, the village needs quite a lot of human and material re-sources. Without the financial and human aid of the government, it’ s very hard to change a local ethnic minority village into a tourist destination. Hence, the government should play a supportive role during the initial stages of tourism develop-ment, while taking the local villagers ’ will and ethnic culture into consideration: the government should consult with the villagers and encourage the villagers’ participation in the whole development process. When indeed the PATT reaches a mature phase, the local people can take over. By then the locals have gained much experience;their attitudes and business skills have sufficiently improved so the government can take a step back, leaving the villagers to further develop the villages by them-selves. The third aspect is an ‘evolving profit model for local people ’ . During the initial stages of PATT, it’ s all about developing basic tourism pro-jects: at this moment, the main profit models for businesses rely on ( a) ethnic culture projects with distinct characteristics, ( b ) establishing high quality modes of the tourists route, and ( c) pro-moting the unique name and fame of the villages. However, when PATT reaches a mature stage, the villagers themselves must further develop and maintain their unique brand and fame. As said, the government takes a step back while local peo-ple are to develop new related sustainable profit models. The fourth issue is the further evolution of‘local talent discovery and activation ’ or‘talent mechanisms’ . Before the initial stages of PATT in Sichuan, the local villagers of the ethnic minorities had been engaged in traditional agriculture for many years;hence it was difficult for them to tran-sition into modern industries such as tourism and hospitality. Moreover, there were very few locals who had any knowledge of this tourism/hospitality industry. E. g. only some elderly people conducted simplistic tour guide practices for tourists: they were unable to provide any in-depth explanations of the traditional ethnic customs and culture due to language barriers. Thus, outsiders ( including gov-ernment staff and tourism professionals ) had to come in and provide advanced concepts, methods, and training. More importantly, a new ‘local tal-ent team’ had to discover and activate local people with tourism talents/abilities. This allowed for a genuine local tourism industry to come into exist-ence and further evolve. However, when PATT reaches a mature stage, the government should re-turn the economic benefits back to the local people and give them the dominant right to further self-de-velopment. A newly developed professional middle class will then allow the local people to further de-cide on the future of the ethnic villages. After the initial ‘local talent discovery and activation ’ , a more mature ‘talent mechanism ’ should be formed. Led by the best local talents, people from all circles should be encouraged to take part in the further development of the local villages and areas:this allows for greater stability and continuity, while new talents can develop more. This article has analyzed the implementation and adaptation of PATT in the province of Si-chuan, including the ( i) adaptation of goals, ( ii) the changing role of the government, ( iii) an evol-ving profit model for local people, and ( iv) evol-ving local talent discovery and activation. Howev-er, the development of ethnic minority villages still seems to face many difficulties and challenges, and need to be studied and discussed more.     

Sensing cities: the politics of migrant sensescapes

This paper explores the sensory misconduct of foreign workers in Singapore as identified by local residents in neighborhoods across the island city. Urban bodies and sensory differentiation form the focal point of discussion, given that complaints about sensory disturbances are sociocultural expressions of rejection which are connected to power relations in the city. I focus on two cases that have been identified from my research on Singapore newspaper archives dating between the 1800s and the present-day context. Employing the notion of transnational urbanism, the paper deliberates upon urban sensory politics in Singapore and shows how urban spaces are sensorially politicized by different groups through content analysis of media reports. By considering both historical and contemporary transnationalism, the paper contributes to further understandings on urbanity, migration, and sensory studies.