European Muslims’ engagement in the public sphere soft counterpublics

This article addresses European Muslims’ public engagement in the arts by applying the concept of counterpublics. It examines two case studies of young German Muslims whose involvement in the public sphere can be described as soft counterpublics. The term soft counterpublics denotes publics that show some characteristics of counterpublics, but are at the same time not only about ‘countering’. They can be seen as ‘in between’ cases, neither strong counterpublics nor completely beyond counterpublics. Their art reflects a diversity of interests that are translated into public expressions and related back to their multiple identities. Motivations and themes are multi-layered. Occasionally, topics address stereotypes and negative identity representations of Muslims, which reflect important characteristics of counterpublics. However, themes can deal with a broad range of matters that go beyond this particular issue and that can be seen in isolation of counterpublics. On the one hand, there is a natural interest in the arts as a tool to express oneself, which is not a typical case of counterpublics. On the other hand, there is also the intention to speak to people through the arts. As well as wanting to reach the Muslim youth community in Germany, who can identify with their art, the case studies are also concerned about the non-Muslim German community and its perception of Muslim identity in Germany.     

Staking the claims of identity: Purism,linguistics and the media in post‐1990 Germany1

The paper examines one of the major metalinguistic debates in post‐war Germany: the debate about the influence of English on German, an issue which was raised in the 1990s in the German media and has dominated media discussions on language ever since. The analysis demonstrates that the debate is deeply embedded in current socio‐political discourses as well as in long‐term discursive traditions concerning, on the one hand, the socio‐political changes following German reunification in 1989/90, which involved a revision of the concepts of nation and nationalism, and, on the other, the genesis of the concept of nation, which is closely bound up with the history of the educated bourgeoisie and the process of standardisation as well as linguistic purism. It is argued that the debate on Anglicisms, as is the case in many other metalinguistic debates, cannot be regarded in isolation from the socio‐political environment and the context of historical usage within which it is embedded.     

Staging Traumatic Memory: Competing Narratives of State Violence in Post-Communist Hungarian Museums

The article examines the way three contemporary Hungarian museums–the House of Terror Museum, the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center–represent the history of the Holocaust and the history of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. Reflecting different political agendas, each of the three museums offers a different interpretation of how the Holocaust fits into the larger narrative of Hungary's 20th century history. The article argues that post-communist public memory has been constructed through debates about these histories. By analyzing the three museums' displays, narratives and the debates surrounding them, the article argues that Hungarian public discourse has yet to come to terms with the meaning and place of “Jewishness” (and the way it has informed “Hungarianness”) in modern Hungarian history. Despite the centrality of Jews and Jewish-non-Jewish relations to the museums' narratives, none are able to offer a clear definition of what “Jewishness” means and how it functioned at different times throughout the 20th century.     

THE STIGMA OF WHITE PRIVILEGE

Beginning in the 1970s, the efforts of the Australian settler state to help its Indigenous minority shifted away from ‘assimilation’ and embraced the principles of ‘self-determination’. According to the rhetoric of the self-determination era – explored in this article as the ‘liberal fantasy space’ – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians should be in control of efforts to improve their lives, ultimately making state intervention redundant. A by-product of this shift was to radically change the role of non-Indigenous people who sought to participate in Indigenous development. No longer in charge of Indigenous advancement, they were now cast as partners and supporters.

This article explores some of the complexities of White anti-racist subjectivities in the self-determination era. It draws on ethnographic research with a group of progressive Whites who work in Indigenous health in northern Australia. A striking feature of contemporary White anti-racist discourse is a reluctance to claim any agency in the process of Indigenous improvement. I argue that applying the concept of stigma to White privilege is a novel and productive approach to understanding this desire for self-effacement. White stigma works in a parallel fashion to the case of liberal Germans who believe the German collective identity is irrevocably tainted by the Holocaust. In the Australian case, the negative characteristics associated with Whiteness act as a barrier to the broader goal of constructing ethical White subjectivities fit for the ‘liberal fantasy space’ of post-colonial justice. In their attempts to overcome this barrier and transcend White stigma, White anti-racists mobilise the identity tropes of missionary, mother, and child. Ultimately, these efforts at self-fashioning point to the ultimate fantasy of decolonisation: the desire of White anti-racists to disappear.     

A DOCUMENTARY REGIME OF VERIFICATION

This essay is concerned with a critical but under theorized practice of modern society – official identification. It makes two arguments about modern identification technologies: they develop within an archival problematization of identity, and secondly, they should be critically analyzed as practices of verification. Although the essay is historical in focus these two arguments are intended as an intervention in debates about contemporary practices of identification and surveillance. The essay examines the emergence of the passport in the US from the 1850s to the 1930s. The contested development of the conviction that the identity in a passport is in ‘fact’ someone's identity is the subject of this history of the passport. The passport is used to argue that official identification, as a modern problem was rethought as the collection, classification and circulation of information through new bureaucratic logics of objectivity. The subsequent assemblage of modern identification practices formed what is best understood as a documentary regime of verification that produced identity as a stable object critical to the governing practices of the modern state. The passport as a technology of verification foregrounds that the modern production of this ‘official identity’ through documents is collapsed into a truth claim, which presents that identity as self-evident.     

WHO CAN SPEAK TO RACE AND NATION?

This article examines the production and publication of the Parekh Report (2000) by drawing upon two related current debates – the decline of the public intellectual and the necessity for a public sociology. It argues that both of these debates have failed to engage with concrete examples of public intellectual labour, with the complexities of public communication sociologically and have been reticent as to which particular intellectual voices are able to enter the public sphere. The article argues that the intellectually orientated, multiculturally constituted Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain Commission which authored the report and the report's moment of publication both offer sites in which these critiques can be developed. The article foregrounds the question as to who is entitled to inaugurate, participate in and shape public debates on race, nation, and national identity and evidences the difficulties of attempting to do so in a ‘race volatile’, anti-intellectual and heavily mediated political milieu.     

Immigration,segregation and social cohesion: is the ‘German model’ fraying at the edges?

In this article, we analyse immigrant integration against the background of German society’s social cohesion. First, we examine the integration process and policies with regard to the integration of first-generation labour migrants into the German ‘national society’ since the 1960s. Even though these ‘guest workers’ were confronted to ethnic and political exclusion owing to the so-called German integration model, they experienced socio-economic integration and, at the local level, some form of political participation. Secondly, we analyse the policies and the integration process of immigrant youth, specifically those of Turkish descent, into contemporary German society, the social cohesion of which is impeded by social exclusion and urban segregation. Our hypothesis is that – in spite of a long-standing refusal to recognise itself as an immigration country – Germany has to some extent incorporated its migrants and achieved an integration consensus, while paradoxically, national integration models in several other Western European countries are currently going through a deep crisis.     

Public spheres,hidden politics and struggles over space: boundaries of public engagement in post‐apartheid South Africa

The development of a public sphere forms a central ingredient in the consolidation of a new political culture following a transition to democracy. The Habermasian idea of the public sphere has been challenged for not taking into account the role of ‘part’ and ‘counter public spheres’, particularly with reference to ‘developing’ societies. ‘Actually existing’ public spheres must therefore be conceptualised within the framework of a broader category of ‘public space’. A national public sphere in South Africa is held back by inequalities of wealth and power. A minority public of privileged consumers has access to a structure of print and electronic media, while the majority population relies on different systems of networking that make up counter publics. After 1994, the public sphere has been influenced by a dominant‐party system, accompanied by a division into formal and informal politics, with formal politics assuming a ritualistic function and ‘Realpolitik’ being played out within the non‐public structures of the dominant party. Meanwhile, critical public debate has had to find its course through varieties of informal politics. The article examines how moral debates around HIV/AIDS and crime in KwaZulu‐Natal have constituted an alternative arena for debate, and how cultural and religious discourses have been the channels of a local public sphere. The article discusses to what extent debates have constituted a local democratic ‘deliberative public sphere’, and looks at the ways in which the local state in the form of the eThekwini Municipality has interacted with local publics since 1994.     

‘Resistance: Which Way the Future?’ A dual-screen installation related to the theme of disability and eugenics

This paper reports the part findings of an evaluation of a dual-screen installation entitled ‘Resistance: Which Way the Future?’ by the writer and director Liz Crow. Central to the installation is the experience of disabled people during the Holocaust period, the values underpinning this neglected period of history and how this relates to understanding the experiences of disabled people today. Simultaneously, this paper raises issue with a previous comment which suggested that disabled people and eugenics are a form of ‘emotive rhetoric’. On the contrary, this paper asserts that the link between eugenics and disability cannot be overstated, and is a significant moment in history where the lived experiences of disabled people – people described as having ‘learning difficulties’, surviving artefacts, and recorded testimonies – have still yet to be explored.     

Uncertainty in the study of belief: the risks and benefits of methodological agnosticism

The study of religious and spiritual beliefs raises complex epistemological and methodological questions for interpretive social scientists concerning our ability to understand the everyday lifeworlds that belief-based communities inhabit. The primary focus of recent debates has been on the long-standing methodological insider/outsider dynamic, defined in terms of religious belief or affiliation, which intersects with other social categories such as gender or ethnicity. We contribute to this debate by considering a relatively neglected position, methodological agnosticism, which informs our study of religion and spirituality in the workplace. We argue that an agnostic position can be methodologically productive as a research strategy, but this must be counterbalanced by awareness of the fieldworker risks, which include emotional distress and identity threats. Agnosticism also encourages greater epistemological reflexivity as it implies ‘not knowing’ in relation to both metaphysics and social scientific knowledge construction. Through this, we highlight the productive nature of uncertainty in the study of belief as an epistemologically and methodologically constructive standpoint.     

Five concepts of religion

In the face of continuing debate about the adequacy and definition of the concept of ‘religion’, this paper argues that it is necessary for the social sciences to become more self-critical about their various – and changing – uses of the term. As this paper shows, three main uses are currently dominant: religion as belief/meaning, religion as identity, and religion as structured social relations. By contrast, some uses which were once important are currently recessive, including Marxist approaches to religion as ideology, and Parsonian conceptions of religion as norms and values. Some new uses are also emerging, including ‘material’ religion, religion as discourse, and religion as practice. Drawing these together, the paper proposes a taxonomy of five main major uses of the term. It reflects on their adequacy, and points out where there are still occlusions: above all with regard to ‘super-social’ or ‘meta-social’ relations with non-human or quasi-human beings, forces and powers.     

Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post‐Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)

This article considers how the study of youth cultural practice in Eastern Europe informs theoretical and empirical debate about youth culture. It charts the trajectory of academic writing on East European youth cultures and suggests the region’s state socialist past (which made social inequalities relatively insignificant at a time when, elsewhere, youth cultural studies were dominated by class‐based readings) combined with the explosion of inequality in the post‐socialist period (by which time class‐resistant post‐subcultural theories led anglophone academic discussion), makes it an interesting vantage point from which to reconsider academic paradigms. Drawing on empirical examples of youth cultural practice in (post)‐socialist Eastern Europe, it argues for a perspective that integrates structural and cultural factors shaping young people’s lives. It suggests moving forward western theoretical debates – often stymied in arguments over nomenclature (‘subculture’, ‘postsubculture’, ‘neo‐tribe’) – by shifting the focus of study from ‘form’ (‘subculture’ etc.) to ‘substance’ (concrete cultural practices) and attending to everyday communicative, musical, sporting, educational, informal economy, and territorial practices. Since such practices are embedded in the ‘whole’ rather than ‘subcultural’ lives of young people, this renders visible how cultural practices are enabled and constrained by the same social divisions and inequalities that structure society at large.     

Beyond essentialism: negotiating Alevi identity in urban Turkey

In Turkey, the Alevi cultural ‘revival’ of the 1990s has been followed by a multifaceted identity-formation process that involves conflicting religio-cultural agendas, intersecting discourses and differing politico-ideological affiliations. Lacking a focus, this process continues to trigger an enriching public debate on Alevi identity, which has been coined an ‘enigma’ and is considered to be associated with ‘ambiguity’ and ‘ambivalence’ by many. What lies beneath the veil of ambiguity has to do with the ‘anti-essentialist’ transformation of Alevism, which reaches beyond religious, cultural and political orthodoxies. As a result of diverse political loyalties, contestation of discourses on Alevi culture and identity and the equivocal character of the Alevi subject, the Alevis seem to be resisting essentialism. In urban Turkey, an anti-essentialist discourse potentially influencing Alevism, I argue, enables the Alevi self to act with a sense of reflexivity and to search for ways to avoid political, cultural or religious orthodoxies.     

Practising family history: ‘identity’ as a category of social practice

Research on family history argues it performs the task of anchoring a sense of ‘self’ through tracing ancestral connection and cultural belonging, seeing it as a form of storied ‘identity‐work’. This paper draws on a small‐scale qualitative study to think further on the identity‐work of family history. Using practice theory, and a disaggregated notion of ‘identity’, it explores how the storying of family histories relates to genealogy as a leisure hobby, a form of historical research, and an information‐processing activity; and examines the social organization of that narrativity, where various practical engagements render certain kinds of genealogical information more, or less, ‘storyable’. Key features of ‘identity‐work’ in family history, such as the construction of genealogy as a personal journey of discovery and identification with particular ancestors, emerge as a consequence of the procedures of family history, organized as a set of practical tasks. The paper explores ‘identity‐work’ as a consequence of people's engagement in specific social practices which provide an internal logic to their actions, with various components of ‘identity’ emerging as categories of practice shaped within, and for, use. Focusing on ‘identity’ as something produced when we are engaged in doing other things, the paper examines how the practical organization of ‘doing other things’ helps produce ‘identity’ in particular ways.     

Track three diplomacy and human rights in Southeast Asia: the Asia Pacific Coalition for East Timor

Transnational networks of non‐government organizations are increasingly becoming a fixture in international relations, particularly their contribution to traditional notions of diplomacy and its objectives. Less noticed, however, is the involvement of transnational NGO networks in alternative channels for diplomatic exchange, which have been referred to as ‘track three diplomacy’. Described as a form of civil society that transcends borders and nationalities, track three networks and activities involve NGO networks that are movement based, and concerned primarily with raising public consciousness over issues. While their direct influence on formal processes of foreign policy‐making has been limited, they have contributed to expanding both the scope of debate in international relations and the breadth of participation in those debates. Track three networks provide a forum for those communities marginalized by an international system that gives primacy of place to states and their officially‐declared concerns. Their impact is limited, however, by their lack of institutionalization and their reluctance to cooperate with government agencies – an issue that goes towards both their effectiveness and their identity in the long‐term.     

Is there a European social work identity?

The aim of this paper is to examine whether at this point in time the notion of a ‘European social work identity’ can be sustained. The paper commences with some brief consideration of theories of identity, and particularly draws attention to social constructionist identity theory, highlighting its focus on identity as a process. Ideas about what constitutes ‘collective identity’ are then examined. From this, two particular models of collective identity are presented which are helpful for understanding cultural identities. These are the more ‘traditional’ notion of collective culture being evidenced by the presence of shared histories and traditions, and the more social constructionist view of collective processes and action to form identities – whether imposed by the state or generated by the people – as constitutive of identities in themselves. ‘European identity’, and then ‘European social work identity’, will then be examined using these models of collective identity. The paper concludes that using social constructionist versions of identity (identity as a process of collectivisation), European social work identity can certainly be established.     

Women and citizenship post‐trafficking: the case of Nepal

This article analyses the relationship between gender, sexuality and citizenship embedded in models of citizenship in the Global South, specifically in South Asia, and the meanings associated with having – or not having – citizenship. It does this through an examination of women's access to citizenship in Nepal in the context of the construction of the emergent nation state in the ‘new’ Nepal ‘post‐conflict’. Our analysis explores gendered and sexualized constructions of citizenship in this context through a specific focus on women who have experienced trafficking, and are beginning to organize around rights to sustainable livelihoods and actively lobby for changes in citizenship rules which discriminate against women. Building from this, in the final section we consider important implications of this analysis of post‐trafficking experiences for debates about gender, sexuality and citizenship more broadly.     

‘Avenge the Lusitania’: The Anti-German Riots in South Africa in 1915

The anti-German riots which erupted simultaneously in many countries in response to the torpedoing of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915 reflected shifts in the status of minorities in multi-ethnic societies at a time of escalating nationalist emotions. This article shows that the situation of the Germans in South Africa differed in important respects from the dilemma in which Germans found themselves in other parts of the world during the First World War. The dominion of the Union of South Africa was embroiled in a struggle between Afrikaners and English-speaking settlers for the definition of white South Africanism. Since most German immigrants had previously tended to amalgamate with the Afrikaner section of the colonial society and had not laid claims to a hyphenated identity, many Afrikaners perceived the attacks on German residents as an assault by urban English-speakers on the Afrikaner community, and Afrikaner public opinion requested that Germans should be treated in a fair manner. The intra-white dispute about a shared South African identity prevented, therefore, the state from sustaining the kind of assimilationist or even discriminatory pressure which German residents had to face in countries such as the USA or Brazil during and after the Great War.     

Obstacles to the Integration of the Holocaust into Post-Communist East European Historical Narratives

Factors that have made it difficult for post-communist East European societies to integrate the Holocaust into their historical cultures include the communist heritage, which downplayed the specifically Jewish Holocaust; sensitivity to charges that a nation was complicit in the murder of the Jews; the framing of East European histories as national narratives into which it is difficult to incorporate the experience of other nations; the feeling that Jewish suffering is recognized, while that of other East Europeans is not; the positive re-evaluation of the interwar and wartime politics and culture after the collapse of communism; the survival and revival of anti-Semitism, with new inputs from the Middle East and from Western Holocaust deniers; the construction in the West of the Holocaust as a centrepiece of twentieth-century history; the influence of East European diasporas; the embedment of the discourse on the Holocaust in the political divide between nativists and Westernizers; the deployment of accusations of Holocaust collaboration as an instrument of foreign policy; and debate over the restitution of confiscated Jewish property. Often these factors come together into a reinforcing discursive structure. The essay’s conclusion suggests how to overcome these obstacles to the integration of the Holocaust into East European histories.     

Toward a Regeneration of Revolutionary Theory

Revolutionary theorists are currently immersed in a critical debate about the future of the field. Allinson has argued that a fifth generation of revolutionary theory has passed us by without our noticing, while I have contended that it is revolutionary theory's fourth generation that is decidedly imperilled. Ritter and Beck – for their part- contend that we should reject the very idea of theoretical ‘generations’, and instead think of progress in revolutionary theory as a series of ongoing and settled debates about certain key topics. The pair contend that revolutionary theory has reached a consensus on two core debates: defining our object of study and determining appropriate methods. Contrary to this position, I argue that while there is much to praise about rejecting generational imagery, doing so necessarily entails that we also critique the self-proclaimed ‘fourth generation' with which such imagery is intertwined. Furthermore, I argue that there does not yet exist consensus among revolutionary theorists about a single definition of revolution, or on the question of which methods to use. Finally, I call for a regeneration of revolutionary theory which moves genuinely beyond the generational mythologies of the past.