The exclusionary side effects of the civic integration paradigm: boundary processes among youth in Swiss schools

Civic integration policies have become common in many European states and require that immigrants commit to integrating into the host society. This article draws on a study with young people in Swiss schools and investigates how these new political debates around civic integration find resonance in everyday narratives about immigration. The boundary approach is used as a framework to study the daily (re)production of the ‘Swiss–foreigner divide’. It reveals that assimilation into ‘Swiss culture’ (e.g. speak the local language and conform to social norms) remains a criterion defining who can become a legitimate member of Swiss society. Nonetheless, integration deficits are often perceived as the rule and transformed into a stigma so that ‘foreigners’ are frequently not recognised as legitimate members of society. This study indicates how the Swiss youth in this study legitimise and (re)produce exclusion and how this exclusion is embedded within past and current Swiss immigration policies.     

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.     

Restoring Law and (Racial) Order to the Old Dominion

In 2006, cities and counties across the USA began adopting ‘Illegal Immigration Relief Acts’ to relieve themselves of the economic and social burden that undocumented immigrants were allegedly presenting. By restricting the access of undocumented residents to housing, jobs and social services, local ordinances would encourage undocumented residents to ‘self-deport’ from the locality if not from the nation. Highly contentious, politically and juridically, local anti-illegal immigration laws have divided communities. Proponents maintain that such laws merely uphold the ‘rule of law’, while opponents see them as thinly veiled efforts to drive out Latin American residents, with immigration status serving as a proxy for race. A growing body of scholarship examines local anti-immigrant law and offers significant insights into the causes and undeniably racialized effects of these laws. Yet the issue of racism requires more scholarly attention. Critical race theory holds that all racisms are historically particular and must be examined as expressive of particular conjunctures. To that end, this essay develops a theoretically informed and historically grounded analysis of local anti-immigration law. It establishes local and national interests in local anti-immigrant law and explains how these interests converge. Through a case study of Prince William County (PWC), Virginia, I examine local anti-immigrant activism and connect them to larger political shifts in the contemporary USA. I argue that local white propertied interests converge with national conservative and federalist interests in the county's anti-illegal immigrant law. The essay seeks to demonstrate the value of bringing cultural studies methodology to bear on (local) immigration law.     

CULTURAL STUDIES IN GERMANY REVISITED

By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin Circle, this paper explores the extent to which the public sphere can open up possibilities for resistance to dominant social relations through ‘traces of meaning’. The author wishes to show how a public space for execution in seventeenth and eighteenth century London opened up a place at different levels of abstraction for a popular plebeian public sphere to flourish. When this public sphere disappeared in 1783, it is shown how its traces of meaning still survived in popular culture. These traces of meaning were re-combined through a royal crisis by more political labouring movements in the early nineteenth century that, in the main, unintentionally re-accentuated the same seventeenth- and eighteenth century-public space in London. By exploring the changing form of this public sphere it is shown how a dominant discourse changes over time and how this dominant discourse can be rendered in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin as ‘heteroglossic’ and refracted into modes of public resistance in specific spaces. To demonstrate this, the ideological form of the public sphere in early nineteenth century Britain is outlined and is then shown how it became refracted within the royal scandal which, in turn, came to be refracted within a specific space in London.     

Negotiating Emancipation

The idea of the public sphere is integral to the scholarship and practice of Women in Development. Unlike the private sphere, it is constructed as that space in society that provides enabling conditions for women’s emancipation. With the advent of neoliberal development and the consequent re-organization of relationships between individuals, states and markets, traditional views on the public sphere are beginning

to falter. There is a growing need to investigate the usefulness of the notion of the contemporary public sphere for women’s emancipation. This article unpacks the construct of the public sphere: the spaces it refers to, the peculiarity of its ideologies and the constructions of women’s emancipation. It reviews two bodies of scholarship, western feminist political theory and gender critiques of neo-liberal development, and

examines the recent theoretical debates on women’s political identity within the public sphere. The article highlights that emancipation of women (their political identities) in the time of neo-liberalism is a complex interplay of gender constructions within and between states, markets and civil societies.     

Public sphere as assemblage: the cultural politics of roadside memorialization

This paper investigates contemporary academic accounts of the public sphere. In particular, it takes stock of post‐Habermasian public sphere scholarship, and acknowledges a lively and variegated debate concerning the multiple ways in which individuals engage in contemporary political affairs. A critical eye is cast over a range of key insights which have come to establish the parameters of what ‘counts’ as a/the public sphere, who can be involved, and where and how communicative networks are established. This opens up the conceptual space for re‐imagining a/the public sphere as an assemblage. Making use of recent developments in Deleuzian‐inspired assemblage theory – most especially drawn from DeLanda's (2006) ‘new philosophy of society’ – the paper sets out an alternative perspective on the notion of the public sphere, and regards it as a space of connectivity brought into being through a contingent and heterogeneous assemblage of discursive, visual and performative practices. This is mapped out with reference to the cultural politics of roadside memorialization. However, a/the public sphere as an assemblage is not simply a ‘social construction’ brought into being through a logic of connectivity, but is an emergent and ephemeral space which reflexively nurtures and assembles the cultural politics (and political cultures) of which it is an integral part. The discussion concludes, then, with a consideration of the contribution of assemblage theory to public sphere studies. (Also see Campbell 2009a)     

Three dimensions of the public sphere on Facebook

The article provides an empirical analysis of the online public sphere in the three dimensions introduced by Dahlgren (2005): structural, representational and interactional. The main subject of analysis is the largest social networking site – Facebook – and Polish users’ activity on the Facebook Pages of political parties and politicians. The researchers analysed data about all users active on those Pages during two 4-month periods in 2013 and 2015. The results of the study show that only a small fraction of Facebook users are active in public political discussions that take place on political Facebook Pages (structural dimension). However, the level of engagement depends on the current political events taking place within the public sphere offline, and users are more active during electoral campaigns. Moreover, Facebook does not provide an alternative public sphere for political actors that are less present in mainstream media. Parties and politicians that are visible in traditional media are also attracting active fans in social media (representational dimension). Nonetheless, non-parliamentary groups have more active fans than would result only from their popularity in mainstream media. Finally, the online public on Facebook is fragmented and clustered into homogenous political groups (interactional dimension), thus supporting the hypothesis on ‘echo chambers’ presented by Sunstein (2001). The divisions are smaller when there are significantly more users involved. However, most of these cross-cutting links are the result of the electoral campaign.     

Quakers,colonies and colonials, 1938–48

Scholars have barely scratched the surface of the history of ‘Black’ peoples in the United Kingdom before the brief episode of immigration which began in 1948. For example, very little is known about the response of ‘white’ organizations, whether religious, philanthropic or political, to colonial issues or to ‘colonials’ in Britain. This article looks at the attitudes, as revealed by central committee minutes, of the Society of Friends, a religious body with a strong anti‐slavery and public service tradition.     

MILK BARS,STARBUCKS AND THE USES OF LITERACY

The starting point for this article is the passage on ‘The Juke-Box Boys’ in Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. This passage is often cited as evidence of Hoggart's residual, Leavisite suspicion of mass culture and his nostalgia for more ‘authentic’ working-class culture. This article moves beyond this critique by discussing Hoggart's account in relation to the broader historical shifts signalled by the development of milk and coffee bars in postwar Britain, and their more recent replacement by corporate fast-food and coffee chains. It argues that Hoggart's critique was not simply a knee-jerk fear of the new; it fed into more widespread anxieties which long predate the media invention of the ‘teenager’ or the emergence of organized youth subcultures. These anxieties were not simply about mass culture and Americanization, but also about cultural literacy, class, the relationship between the public and private sphere, and the losses and gains of rising affluence – concerns that have been increasingly submerged in post-Thatcherite political culture.     

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.     

The universal acts

Drawing on official acts of Western multicultural democracies – predominantly the UK Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (2002) and its accompanying documents and actions – this article investigates, via an engagement with Judith Butler, the constitution of ‘the biopolitics of immigration’. It also argues that the biopolitics of immigration both presupposes – in the form of an injunction – and produces a certain ethics: what the author calls, drawing on Butler's work, ‘an ethics of bodies that matter’. This ‘ethics of bodies that matter’ will be seen as a source of political hope; it will guarantee the possibility of enacting differently the political acts that regulate the issues of asylum, immigration and nationality.     

Witchcraft as subtext: deep knowledge and the South African public sphere

Anthropologists have documented pervasive discourses about witchcraft in South Africa. The issue of witchcraft gained prominence during the latter years of apartheid when youths called ‘Comrades’ sought to cleanse rural villages in the north‐eastern provinces of witches. However, after apartheid witchcraft has only made a few brief incursions into the South African public sphere. I suggest that the absence of witchcraft in formal political discussions is not only due to censorship by a modernist government. It is also a product of the popular status of witchcraft as ‘deep knowledge’ or as a ‘subtext’ to social interaction in village and township settings. Accusations of witchcraft occur largely in private domestic spaces. Moreover, the ontological status of witchcraft as a mystical reality that transcends ordinary perception implies that it cannot meet standards of proof demanded by courts of law.     

Exploring the Contextual Determinants of Individual Attitudes toward Immigrants and Criminal Activity and their Spillover Policy Implications

Immigrants are routinely tied to a range of social problems in the policy making process in the US political system. Little is known however about the extent to which citizens hold attitudes that connect immigrants to particular social problems and whether these attitudes spill over to influence citizens’ preferences toward specific public policy alternatives that might appear to be largely independent of immigrants and immigration. Investigating the nexus between immigration and crime, we ask how Anglo whites’ contextual environments influence their propensity to link immigrants to a salient social pathology like crime. Results show that whites living in states where immigrant populations have increased most dramatically and in states with lower socioeconomic characteristics are more likely to associate immigration with increased criminal activity. Whites’ attitudes toward immigration‐induced crime has important spillover implications to the larger public policy making process as whites who view immigrants as a cause of criminal activity are more likely to support tougher criminal sentencing and the death penalty.     

ON 'MAELSTROMS LARGE AND SMALL,METAPHORICAL AND ACTUAL': 'GRAY ZONES' IN THE WRITINGS OF PRIMO LEVI

This article examines the work of Primo Levi, with a focus on the tensions between ‘witness’ and ‘public intellectual’ in Levi's work. It analyses the notion of ‘gray zones’ in Levi's writings, where it functions as a way of indicating transformations in political action and public discourse in the wake of Auschwitz: most importantly, the Nazi genocide undermined the position of ‘spectator’ crucial to liberal discourse by implicating the spectator as a ‘bystander’. The study goes on to discuss the concepts of ‘work’, ‘science’ and ‘intellect’ in Levi's writing, showing how these categories reflect Levi's ultimately unsuccessful struggle to uncover a mode of political thought and public intervention adequate to the changes in political space of which the ‘gray zone’ is symptomatic, i.e. a condition of universal complicity and powerlessness. It concludes that implicit (and undeveloped) in Levi's thought is a set of ‘aesthetico-political’ presuppositions concerned with the articulation of founding, legitimacy and judgement. These presuppositions challenge the reliance of emancipatory discourses upon subjectivity and the logic of self-determination, indicating the need for a politics based on ‘pedagogical accountability’. Resisting the postmodern logic of ‘testimony’, which emerges in the gap between universal claims and their performance and hence dismantles the ‘outside’ as a space of judgement, i.e. the determination of the legitimacy of actions, the politics of pedagogical accountability grounds such an outside in the conjoining of power, responsibility for the world and boundary thinking. This space ‘outside’ ideology and the circulation of subjectivities emerges via resistance to the specifically ‘anti-political’ violence pervasive in late capitalism, and through the clarification of the distinction between this mode of violence and that (‘pre-political’) violence aimed at ‘subjects’.     

Living with uncertainty: disappearing modernities and polluted urbanity in post‐2000 Harare,Zimbabwe

Most studies of Zimbabwean migration and the country’s politico‐economic crisis focus on the material aspects of these two issues. In this article, through dual‐sited ethnographic work, I illustrate the symbolisms and meanings that are entangled within political and economic decline in urban Zimbabwe. Using data from fieldwork in Zimbabwe and South Africa, I argue that ‘crisis’ has carried with it a re‐configuration of the meanings associated with urbanity. This leads to a contradiction between how the state and citizens view ‘proper’ modernity. In combination with political factors, the state’s attempts to maintain modernity have led to a paradigm of pollution being associated with poor urbanites. This symbolism and its correspondent reality were found to have influenced the migration of informants in South Africa. It is thus not only economic and political relations that are at stake in present‐day Zimbabwe.     

Demanding an ‘adequate solution:’ the American Legion,the Immigration Act of 1924, and the politics of exclusion

This article analyses the American Legion’s role in developing a discourse of exclusion surrounding the Immigration Act of 1924. The Legion strategically used the political rhetoric of states’ rights and federalism in addition to racist and nativist language to emphasise the need for increased federal restrictions on immigration. The arguments found in the Legion’s resolutions, pamphlets and testimony to Congress place the organisation’s emphasis on the political disruptions caused by Japanese migrants within the context of evolving immigration reform. The Legion’s activism in exclusion contributes to an understanding of the history of states’ rights and federalism tropes in anti-immigrant arguments during the twentieth century.     

Youth participation in ‘post‐secular’ times: young Muslim and Buddhist practitioners as religious citizens

Recently there has been renewed interest in the role of religion in the public sphere in the context of a ‘post‐secular’ age characterized by the resurgence of religious identities and communities in increasingly diverse, multi‐faith societies. Young people's active political and civic engagement has also emerged as a core challenge for robust democracies. While an interesting body of current research suggests that religious commitment may cultivate participation amongst youth by acting as an incubator of civic and political engagement, such literature often positions religiosity as outside of, and consequently at odds with participation in a secular public sphere. We suggest that while religiosity may indeed act as an incubator for civic and political engagement, we propose greater attention to an emergence of alternative, entwined conceptualizations of religious citizenship evident in the practices, performances and dispositions of young Muslim and Buddhist religious practitioners in Australia, whereby processes of individuation contribute to greater fluidity within and across the domains of the religious and the civic.     

‘Operating in the Ethnic Sphere’: Irish Migrant Networks and the Question of Respectability in Nineteenth-Century South Wales

This study explores the problems of entry by middle-class Irish migrants into respectable urban elite networks in British towns. Although opportunities to participate in political, cultural and charitable institutions were plentiful in nineteenth-century urban Britain, few Irish migrants achieved such distinctions. In the context of south Wales, this was because there were few opportunities for Irish migrants to acquire the necessary occupational status for entry into public life. Those Irish who worked in ‘middle class’ occupations, were more likely to do so in the retail and service sectors than in the professions, from which ranks local ‘worthies’ were more likely to be drawn. As a result, they struggled to attain status and remained on the margins of respectable Welsh middle-class life. For these Irish, the ‘ethnic sphere’ provided an alternative network within which status and recognition could be achieved.     

Expressive Free Speech,the State and the Public Sphere: A Bakhtinian–Deleuzian Analysis of ‘Public Address’ at Hyde Park

In this paper I explore how struggles around free speech between social movements and the state are often underpinned by a deeper struggle around expressive images of what counts as either ‘decent’ or ‘indecent’ discussion. These points are developed by exploring what is arguably the most famous populist place for free speech in Britain, namely Hyde Park. In 1872 the state introduced the Parks Regulation Act in order to regulate, amongst other things, populist uses of free speech at Hyde Park. However, although the 1872 Act designated a site in Hyde Park for public meetings, it did not mention ‘free speech’. Rather, the 1872 Act legally enforced the liberty to make a ‘public address’ and this was implicitly contrasted by the state of an expressive image of ‘indecent’ speakers exercising their ‘right’ of free speech at Hyde Park. Once constructed, the humiliating image of ‘indecent’ free speech could then be used by the state to regulate actual utterances of public speakers at Hyde Park. But the paper shows how in the years immediately following 1872 a battle was fought out in Hyde Park over the expressive image of public address between the state and regulars using Hyde Park as a public sphere to exercise free speech. For its part the state had to engage in meaningful deliberative forms of discussion within its own regulatory framework and with the public sphere at Hyde Park in order to maintain the legal form, content and expression of the 1872 Act. To draw out the implications of these points I employ some of the theoretical ideas of the Bakhtin Circle and Gilles Deleuze. Each set of thinkers in their own way make valuable contributions for understanding the relationship between the state, public sphere and expressive images.     

Embedding and disembedding of political elites: a filter system approach

This article looks at the issue of political disengagement in mature democracies and the growing tendency towards disconnect between citizens and their political representatives. It locates itself in relation to ‘demand‐side’ (external to politics) and critical ‘supply‐side’ (focused on the political centre) explanations of disengagement. It concentrates on the latter and, accordingly, builds on critical, post‐Marxist and elite‐oriented work. As such it follows on from earlier calls in the journal for a return to elite‐based research (Savage and Williams, 2008). Drawing on general concepts in economic sociology (Polanyi, Granovetter) the article presents an alternative embedding‐disembedding paradigm for explaining and evaluating this tendency towards political elite disengagement. The propensity for politicians to disembed from wider society is explained by way of a series of eight ‘filters’. Such filters work, alone or cumulatively, both to socially embed political elites within the institutions and networks of formal politics and also to disembed them from wider society and the populace they represent. The interpretive framework outlined here draws on a combination of secondary literature and ongoing interview‐based research with some 150 political actors (politicians, journalists, officials) working at Westminster. As such, the filters and embedding‐disembedding paradigm focuses primarily on the UK case. However, the framework is easily adaptable to other nations and systems.