Normality unpacked: migration,ethnicity and Local Structure of Feeling among Polish migrant workers in Northern Ireland with a comparative perspective on Scotland

Previous literature on Polish migration to the UK identified a discourse of normality as a grand narrative in migrants’ justifications for living and working abroad. The present article contributes to this literature by asking what happens to this discourse in the circumstances of the UK, where it cannot be easily sustained. To explore this issue, the case of Northern Ireland is chosen and it is illustratively compared to that of Scotland. Using the concept of Structures of Feeling to frame the analysis of semi-structured interviews with Polish migrant workers, the study shows that, on the one hand, migration experience in Northern Ireland seems to undermine the ideal of a normal life as well as the idealised images of the UK that the discourse of normality conveys. However, it also shows that this discourse remains an important feature of migrants’ narratives. In accounting for this inconsistency within interviews, the article proposes the notion of ‘normality through exclusion’. It also shows that, although not straightforwardly different from the experience of migration to other parts of the UK, the experience of migration to Northern Ireland is also characterised by certain subtleties which are well accounted for by the concept of Structures of Feeling.     

Shehri (city) brides between Indian Punjab and the UK: transnational hypergamy,Sikh women's agency and gendered geographies of power

This paper explores Sikh transnational marriages contracted between the UK and Indian Punjab. Ethnographic and statistical studies have found that transnational marriage is less popular among UK-born Indian Sikhs than Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. Those who marry transnationally tend to be less educated than those who marry in the UK, and there is an apparent pattern in transnational marriages wherein UK-born men are likely to marry women from India who are more educated than themselves, or shehri (city) women as they are called in Punjabi. The paper explores two shehri brides’ lived experience of marriage and explores the constraints on their agency and the forms that it takes at a number of ‘geographies’ or scales: in their relationships with their natal families, with their in-laws, husbands, the labour market and the state. The paper argues that state discourses problematising marriage migration in socio-economic and integration terms must be critiqued, not only because the shehri brides go against classed policy framings of the migrant wife but also because such framings deny the agency of all migrant women as they struggle to move on with their lives over time.     

Gender and citizenship in academic career progression: an intersectional,meso-scale analysis in German higher education institutions

ABSTRACT

In tune with the fundamental shift in Germany’s skill-b(i)ased immigration policy since 2005, higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly becoming ‘magnets’ for a skilled migrant workforce. While ‘internationalisation’ is often understood as something to be celebrated and (further) accomplished, some observers speak of clear signs of discriminatory experiences among racialised and migrant academics. This is a new aspect, as social inequalities have by and large been considered in migration studies to be the sole terrain of labour mobility into less-skilled sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, abundant literature on gender and higher education shows that women academics have poorer access to career progression than men, demonstrating gender-based academic career inequalities. However, the insights generated in these two strands of scholarship have seldom been in conversation with one another. This paper takes stock of the lack of an intersectional perspective, focusing on citizenship and gender within HEIs as hiring meso-level organisations that are becoming increasingly transnationalised. It explores the intersectionality of citizenship and gender in accessing academic career advancement by examining three key career stages, that is, doctoral researchers, postdoctoral researchers, and professors, in two case-study HEIs.     

Breaking the silences,breaking the frames: a gendered diasporic analysis of sexual violence in the DRC

ABSTRACT

The role of diasporas in fuelling conflict has been extensively studied, with much less attention being paid to their role in peace-building. It is increasingly recognised that diasporas from conflict regions are contributing to the reconstruction of their countries of origin, acting as ‘peace-makers’ rather than ‘peace-wreckers’. Women and men migrants have also been found to engage differently towards their country of origin, but attention to women’s activism is still scarce. This article addresses the issue of political activism by Congolese women in the diaspora in both the UK and Belgium. Their activities are assessed analytically through the prism of ‘mechanisms of framing’, which shape the ways in which messages are conveyed during the mobilisation process. The paper discusses diagnostic, motivational and prognostic frames to address sexual and gender-based violence against Congolese women in the protracted conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Framing strategies vary among Congolese diaspora women’s groups depending on the national context in which they are embedded (Belgium and the UK) but a variety of narratives is also discerned which transcends and is shared among Congolese women beyond national borders.     

Palestinians and the Arab Uprisings: political activism and narratives of home,homeland, and home-camp

This article examines the ways in which Palestinians have been affected by the Arab Uprisings and their aftermath, especially in light of their statelessness and protracted refugeedom. It does so by analysing the narratives of 49 Palestinians who were based in France, Sweden, and the UK at the time of interview between 2012 and 2014. We show that the forms of mobilisation and/or identifications that Palestinians in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and beyond engaged in with regard to the Arab Uprisings, transcended the link between the host state and the homeland. They extended to a plurality of in-between spaces such as Palestinian refugee camps, Arab host states, and Arab countries experiencing the uprisings. We argue that these in-between spaces became salient to broader conceptions of Palestinian identity and activism because Palestinian-ness is shaped not only through attachment to place, but also through particular experiences that are associated with Palestinian identity.     

‘They don’t look like children’: child asylum-seekers,the Dubs amendment and the politics of childhood

In October 2016, following a campaign led by Labour Peer Lord Alfred Dubs, the first child asylum-seekers allowed entry to the UK under new legislation (the ‘Dubs amendment’) arrived in England. Their arrival was captured by a heavy media presence, and very quickly doubts were raised by right-wing tabloids and politicians about their age. In this article, I explore the arguments underpinning the Dubs campaign and the media coverage of the children’s arrival as a starting point for interrogating representational practices around children who seek asylum. I illustrate how the campaign was premised on a universal politics of childhood that inadvertently laid down the terms on which these children would be given protection, namely their innocence. The universality of childhood fuels public sympathy for child asylum-seekers, underlies the ‘child first, migrant second’ approach advocated by humanitarian organisations, and it was a key argument in the ‘Dubs amendment’. Yet the campaign highlights how representations of child asylum-seekers rely on codes that operate to identify ‘unchildlike’ children. As I show, in the context of the criminalisation of undocumented migrants‘, childhood is no longer a stable category which guarantees protection, but is subject to scrutiny and suspicion and can, ultimately, be disproved.     

The Ulster Covenant and the pulse of Protestant Ulster

The signing of the Ulster Covenant on 28 September 1912 by almost 450,000 men and women was a powerful act of defiance on the part of Unionists in the context of what they perceived as the threat to their way of life represented by the Liberal Government's policy of Irish Home Rule. This article attempts to look beyond the well-studied leadership figures of Carson and Craig in order to fashion insights into the way Ulster Protestant society was mobilised around the Covenant and opposition to Home Rule. It draws attention to hitherto over-shadowed personalities who can be said to have exerted crucial local influence. It also contends that although pan-Protestant denominational unity provided the basis for the success of the Covenant, the Presbyterian community was particularly cohesive and purposeful in the campaign. The article further argues that the risk-taking defiance that came more easily to the Presbyterians, on account of a troubled history, largely evaporated in the new political circumstances of Northern Ireland when it became a separate devolved political entity within the UK from 1921.     

Self-employed migrants from EU Member States in Poland: differentiated professional trajectories and explanations of entrepreneurial success

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the diversified self-employment trajectories of intra-EU migrant entrepreneurs in Poland in the context of the culture hierarchies persistent in Europe. The business ventures are established by intra-EU labour migrants, graduates of Polish universities, but also lifestyle migrants and individuals who migrate to Poland because of a partner or family residing here. Nationals of the post-2004 Member States are more inclined to register their own business entities than are nationals of the EU-15 countries: they are also more susceptible to the risk of failure (closing or suspending an enterprise). Qualitative research reveals that the career trajectories of EU-15 nationals are not necessarily dependent upon integration efforts. Immigrant entrepreneurs from countries like the UK or Spain may attract customer attention by profiting from their cultural background, but many of them exhibit a tendency to live in language and cultural enclaves. Migrant entrepreneurs from the EU-12 typically become successful in their business activities when they are well integrated with the host society - especially if they have a good knowledge of Polish.     

Transnational mobility among early-career academics: gendered aspects of negotiations and arrangements within heterosexual couples

ABSTRACT

Today, transnational mobility is often presented as indispensable for a successful academic career. This institutionalisation of transnational mobility for young academics has important effects in (re)producing or transforming gender inequalities. Building on the results of a qualitative study conducted at three universities – Zurich (Switzerland), UCLA (U.S.A), and Cambridge (UK) – this paper examines the mobility experiences of early-career academics and their partners and seeks to understand the gendered mechanisms underlying mobility patterns. Drawing on three case studies, this paper focuses on the negotiations and arrangements of mobile couples. Each case study represents a different ideal-typical pattern of how gender is entangled with mobility. We show how gender is ‘done’ and ‘undone’ by the academics and their partners throughout these mobility trajectories, and how these couples’ negotiations and practices are closely entangled with gender representations that are structurally anchored in labour markets and discursively expressed within the wider social environment. As such, this paper questions the dichotomy between economic men and social and cultural women sometimes reproduced in studies on highly skilled migration. Furthermore, the findings challenge earlier studies that suggest a causal link between mobility and the leaky pipeline by showing that important transformations with regard to gender relations are occurring.     

Gender,migration and care deficits: what role for the sustainable development goals?

ABSTRACT

This article explores migration to higher income countries in light of collective commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and argues that domestic social protection and labour market policy will need to be modified to meet these commitments. We look primarily at women in care work, using a broad definition of care that includes home help, domestic work and health care. We argue that the failure to recognise and value unpaid care work has created a sustained labour demand for women migrant care workers in many of these labour-importing countries. Increasingly, immigrant women are being imported into host economies to care, often in informal settings, and frequently engaged by private households, without full access to social protection and labour rights. The consistent application of SDG goals 5 and 8 and their linking to existing labour rights norms and conventions could simultaneously address care deficits in home and host countries and protect the rights of care workers in labour-importing countries and ensure that migrant workers are able to claim these rights.     

Linking gender,class and race in Brazil1

This article examines the socio‐historical effects of the intersection of representations of gender, race, and the nation which determine black Brazilian women's subaltern social position and inform their self‐representations. This intersection is presented from two perspectives: analysis of quantitative data and a case study. Through the examination of socio‐economic data on black women participation in the labour market, it show that, when compared with white women and black men, black women are unequally concentrated in certain low paid jobs in the service industry, such as for instance domestic work. Through a brief case study, basically interviews with women from different colours and social classes — i.e. domestic workers and their employers — it shows how the particularities of domestic work inform black women's race and gender self‐definitions.     

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.     

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.     

英国牛津市考利穆斯林社区汤瓶民俗文化变迁研究

汤瓶①是穆斯林所共享、传承的风俗习惯,是信仰伊斯兰教的穆斯林在生产生活过程中所形成的物质的、精神的文化现象。汤瓶民俗文化传入英国牛津市至今表现出了传承性和变异性的特征。研究表明,考利社区印巴穆斯林移民族群内部的发展、外部接触等是引起汤瓶民俗文化变迁的重要内外因。     

浅谈我国少数民族妇女在新时期的重要作用

本文就我国少数民族妇女在新时期的重要作用作了如下四个方面的分析 :一、少数民族妇女现有的生活方式及其角色转换形式发生的变化 ,在一定程度上反映了民族地区经济文化事业的发展和社会进步 ;二、少数民族妇女自身素质的提高 ,在一定程度上反映了少数民族地区民族整体素质的提高 ;三、少数民族妇女一生中的几个重要时期对社会的作用 ;四、新时期少数民族妇女的自身锻造和社会的重视与培养是一个民族发展繁荣的重要问题。     

Fetal citizenship in the borderlands: Arizona's house bill 2443 and state logics of racism and orientalism

In 2011, Arizona passed the ‘Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011’, which makes it a felony for doctors to knowingly perform an abortion for race or sex selective reasons. To convince the House and Senate to pass House Bill 2443, advocates constructed African American, Asian American and Asian immigrant women's reproduction as troublesome: these women were either victims of a racist, eugenicist family planning organization that sought to limit fertility or they were victims of a sexist heteropatriarchal family structure that prefers male sons. Or, in another rendering, Asian women were cast as ‘backward’ migrants who have not assimilated to American gender equality. My essay argues that House Bill 2443 appears to be about reproduction, but must be understood with a lens that is attentive to racism, colonialism, and anti-immigrant sentiments in Arizona's past and contemporary moment. In other words, state measures that criminalize abortion need to be read against the on-going cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples and recent laws that criminalize Latin@ migrants. In the borderlands, reproduction is intimately tied to citizenship and state repression.     

EU post-accession Polish migrants trajectories and their settlement practices in Scotland

The presence and the apparent permanence of post-accession EU migrants in the UK is of significant interest to both academics and politicians. Studies have debated whether migration from new accession countries to the UK mark a new type of migration often described as ‘liquid’ and ‘open ended’, or whether these migrants will settle in the new destination countries. Based on a qualitative study of Poles who have lived in Scotland for at least six years, we observed four typologies of what we call migrants’ settling practices: (1) stayers, (2) over-stayers, (3) circular and transnational migrants and (4) economic migrants. The findings from this study demonstrate that Polish migrants do not have fixed ideas about the duration of their migration (in terms of a sense of permanence) but instead focus on diverse links, anchors or attachments in Scotland and Poland in describing their settling practices. Thus, the main contribution the article makes is to present an in-depth understanding of what settlement means from the perspective of migrants themselves. This paper concludes by providing a short comment on implications of the outcome of the Referendum on EU membership ‘Brexit’ in June 2016 on Polish migrants settling practices.     

行动与反思——对环县道情皮影保护利用的现状、问题及趋势的研究

文章通过实地调查研究,总结了环县道情皮影保护利用的现状,分析了保护中存在的问题,并对我们正在实施的行为和行为的成效进行了反思,提出了相应的对策。     

Adapting to change in the higher education system: international student mobility as a migration industry

ABSTRACT

Of late there has been considerable interest in understanding international student mobility, and this has tended to focus on the perspective of the students who take part in this mobility. However, international students are part of a considerable migration industry comprised of international student recruitment teams, international education agents and other institutions selling an education overseas (such as the British Council in a UK context) and as yet there is little research which analyses these relationships. This paper investigates a series of interviews with international office staff to examine the methods they use to recruit international students, and in particular the relationship that they have with international education agents who work with them on a commission basis. It focuses on recent changes to the UK visa system which have led to a decline in the numbers of Indian students choosing to study towards a UK higher education. However, it also reveals that some universities have managed to avoid this trend. This paper investigates why this is the case, demonstrating that there is a need to think about the intersections between migration industries, visa regulations and international student mobility.     

New label no progress: institutional racism and the persistent segregation of Romani students in the Czech Republic

Abstract

The over-representation of Romani children in special schools in the Czech Republic is well documented and widely condemned. In 2007 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found the state guilty of discrimination against Romani children on the basis of disproportionate placement of children in remedial special schools. In 2015 high numbers of Romani children are still being misdiagnosed with special educational needs (SEN) and offered a limited and inappropriate education. This article explores the challenges which continue to hamper their successful inclusion in the Czech education system. Using critical race theory (CRT) as a lens to examine the Czech case, problems with the current policy trajectory are identified. The article shows that institutional racism persists in the Czech Republic, shaping attitudes and practices at all levels. Policymakers demonstrate little recognition of ingrained educational inequalities and Roma continue to be widely perceived as ‘others’ who must learn to adapt to Czech ways rather than as citizens who are entitled to services on their own terms.