Policing gender mobilities: interrogating the ‘feminisation of migration’ to Europe

This article proposes a gendered critique of the European Neighbourhood Policy, a framework that, amongst other things, aims to facilitate the mobility of migrants to the EU from the bordering countries. We highlight the ambivalences of European gender and migration regimes, and we take issue with the celebration of the ‘feminisation of migration’. The former fails to offer opportunities to women to safely embark on autonomous migratory projects, the latter contributes to reproduce traditional gender biases in the countries of origin as well as of destination. We conclude by suggesting that the EU critique to emigration countries for failing to tackle women’s discrimination is less than persuasive when assessed vis-á-vis with the curtailment on women’s independent mobility across European borders.     

Between ‘homeland’ and ‘diaspora’: multicultural education in Israel and South Korea

The aim of this qualitative case study was to explore multicultural education for ‘newcomers’ in Israel and in South Korea. Despite their differences, the two countries face the same inflow of two types of newcomers – one group that is expected to fully integrate, and the other of newcomers considered temporary. The educational challenge that results is recognition of the cultural groups, and providing equal educational opportunities, for both. Four schools were compared, two in each country, measuring multicultural education according to Bank’s five dimensions. Findings show that the same dimensions could be identified in all schools. The differences were in the school’s interpretation of the cultural identity of the students, congruent with their legal status, and degree of acceptability by the host country. The groups that were expected to fully integrate into the host country (perceived as a ‘homeland’) were given a more assimilatory education, as manifested in the Content Integration dimension; whereas the groups that were considered foreign were given a more multicultural education, with the schools making more references to their national culture, thus enhancing an identity of a ‘diaspora.’     

‘Us’ and ‘them’: the limits and possibilities of a ‘politics of neurodiversity’ in neoliberal times

The neurodiversity movement claims that there are neurological differences in the human population, and that autism is a natural variation among humans – not a disease or a disorder, just ‘a difference’. A ‘politics of neurodiversity’ is based on the claim that the ‘neurodiverse’ population constitutes a political grouping comparable with those of class, gender, sexuality or race. This paper considers the limits and possibilities of neurodiverse political activism, and concludes by calling for a politics of identity that does not depend on a politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’.     

‘Sitting on the Mourning Bench’: Mental Health Workers and an Elderly Client

Abstract

The present article documents the experience of a first year social work student on fieldwork placement in an Aged Persons Mental Health Service. The student was part of a team providing service to a long-term client of the service when he was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. The student's compassionate response to the client raises questions about grief and professionalism, which she explored through a journal and in discussion with her supervisor and other team members working with the client. As part of their reflective practice, the student, her supervisor and the client's mental health workers formed a collective to document their experience and present a staff education session. This article is the outcome of these processes and explores important grief issues in Aged Psychiatry and demonstrates the valuable contribution made by a student to the work of the team in the rich learning environment of a fieldwork placement in aged psychiatry. It is published with the kind permission of the client's next of kin.     

Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘‘Relations Between Gambling and Alcohol Use’‘

It has long been recognized that gambling is an activity that is often combined with alcohol intake. Not only do the behaviors of drinking and gambling frequently co-occur, alcohol use disorders and pathological gambling are also commonly co-morbid conditions in both clinical and non-clinical samples. This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Gambling Studies focusing on cutting edge findings on the relations between gambling and alcohol use behaviors and their associated disorders. We set the stage for the following series of six novel empirical papers and integrative commentary by reviewing the theoretical pathways through which alcohol use and gambling disorders may be linked. We conclude by describing some of the novel contributions of each of the empirical studies from within the context of these theoretical models.     

Social work and the politics of ‘austerity’: Ireland and Italy

ABSTRACT

No detailed analyses have been undertaken comparing and contrasting how social work is responding to the problems generated by the imposition of so-called ‘austerity’ measures in Europe. Comprised of three sections, the discussion is focused on Ireland and Italy. This comparative exploration locates social work within encompassing frameworks related to the changing population, political economy and welfare regime in each of these jurisdictions. Aspects of contemporary social work within Ireland and Italy are charted and the possibilities for confronting neoliberal ‘austerity’ are analysed. The article seeks to prompt and encourage comparative reflection within Europe in relation to how the social work imagination can be imbued with a new radicalism in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.     

Female narratives of ‘new’ citizens’ belonging(s) and identities in Europe: case studies from the Netherlands and Britain

Public discourses on citizenship, identity and nationality, which link geographical borders and the political boundaries of a community, are infused with tensions and contradictions. This paper illustrates how these tensions are interwoven with multilayered notions of home, belonging, migration, citizenship and individual's ‘longing just to be’, focusing on the Dutch and the British context. The narratives of a number of Dutch and British women, who either immigrated to the respective countries or were born to immigrants, illustrate how the growing rigid integration and assimilative discourses in Europe contradict an individual anchoring in national and local communities. The narratives of women participating in these studies show multilayered angles of belonging presenting an alternative to the increasing strong argument for a fixed notion of positioning and national belonging. The female ‘new’ citizens in our study tell stories of individual choices, social mobility and a sense of multiple belonging in and across different communities.     

Rwanda's ‘Hutsi’: intersections of ethnicity and violence in the lives of youth of ‘mixed’ heritage

This article looks at young Rwandans of ‘mixed’ Hutu–Tutsi heritage, exploring how their mixed identity shaped their experiences during the 1994 genocide and how it influences their everyday experiences of categorization and belonging in contemporary Rwanda. It reveals the complex position of these young ‘Hutsi’ and the significant constraints they face in exercising identity choices in a context with a history of ethnic violence and where state policies have outlawed ethnicity. This article argues that the experiences, narratives and performances of these young Rwandans simultaneously challenge and reinforce the binary ‘ethnic logic’ that persists in contemporary Rwanda. Yet it suggests that providing space for Rwanda's ‘Hutsi’ and their diverse experiences could help to de-essentialize the categories ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ and reduce the risks of future violence.     

Exploring the depths of gender,parenting and ‘work’: critical discursive psychology and the ‘missing voices’ of involved fatherhood

ABSTRACT

This paper sets out to capture the missing voices of fathers in discussions around gender, parenting and work. Using Critical Discursive Psychology (CDP), a qualitative methodology that frames discourse, language and action as socially situated, the paper sets out to understand the complexities of involved fatherhood. Using data from two distinct research projects that considered managing tensions around parenting and paid work, alongside the move to ‘involved fatherhood’, we examine the ways in which different discourses are operating in order to construct stories around gender and parenting. We are particularly interested in the ways in which participants use language and, specifically, discourses of parenting, working and caring. Through the interview excerpts we analysed how simultaneously participants position themselves in the discourses and were also being positioned by the wider societal discourses. We consider how CDP can contribute rich insights into the ways in which fathers are arranging sharing parenting caregiving responsibilities, using these insights to inform the policy landscape. We finish the paper by suggesting that CDP methodology can be mobilised by researchers wanting to capture missing voices in shifting policy landscapes.     

Exploring the Interaction Between Volunteering Status,Paid Job Characteristics and Quality of Volunteers’ Motivation on Mental Health

The literature on the health-promoting effects of community work has primarily dealt with the population in retirement age, yet the vast majority of volunteers are people still in the workforce. The aim of this study is to observe the relationship between volunteering and health within the context of working life, considering paid work conditions and motives to volunteer as moderating variables. We conducted an online survey with a sample of Swiss workers employed in different industries. Results show that volunteers with self-determined motives (but not with controlled motives) report lower levels of stress and burnout than non-volunteers. Moreover, volunteers in general (regardless of the quality of motivation) report higher levels of work engagement and well-being. Analyses further reveal an interaction effect for burnout and stress, where the difference between self-determined volunteers and non-volunteers becomes larger with unfavorable working conditions at their paid job, hinting at potential compensatory effects. Implications for future research and the voluntary sector are discussed.     

Parental religiosity and daughters’ fertility: the case of Catholics in southern Europe

Preferences, including preferences for children, are shaped during the formative years of childhood. It is therefore essential to include exposure to religious practice during childhood in an attempt to establish a link between religiosity and fertility. This path has not been explored in the documented literature that looks at the relationship between current religiosity and fertility. The International Social Survey Programme: Religion II (ISSP) provides the data base. It includes information on maternal/paternal/own mass participation when the respondent was a child (nine levels each), as well as on his current churchgoing (six levels) and prayer habits (eleven levels). These variables are included as explanatory variables in ‘fertility equations’ that explain the number of children of Catholic women in Spain and Italy. The core findings are that exposure to religiosity during the formative years of childhood, has a pronounced effect on women’s ‘taste for children’ that later on translates into the number of her offspring. In Spain, the two parents have major opposite effects on women. Most striking is the negative effect of the mother’s intensity of church attendance on her daughter’s fertility: Women who were raised by an intensively practicing mother have on average one child less that their counterparts who were raised by a less religious mother. On the other hand, an intensively practicing father encourages the daughter to have more children (by about 0.8, on average). The Italian sample confirms the statistically significant negative effect of the mother’s religiosity. The father’s religious conduct has apparently no effect on Italian women’s birth rates. Current religiosity seems to be irrelevant, both in Spain and in Italy. It follows that religiosity and fertility are interrelated but the mechanism is probably different from the simplistic causality that is suggested in the literature.

‘Power Differences’ and ‘the Power of Difference’: The Dominance of Secularism as Ontological Injustice

Abstract

Recent religious studies and international relations scholarship has highlighted secularism as a critical element in dominant modes of identity, power, and exclusion in global politics. Yet, the implications of these insights for global justice theory and practice have rarely been considered. This article suggests that the current dominance of secularism within global justice theory and practice risks undermining the global justice project. Specifically, I argue that secularism’s dominance constitutes an ontological injustice, where both alternative non-secular visions of the world and visions of alternative non-secular worlds are subordinated to secular ontologies. However, this argument raises a crucial question: if, despite secularism’s claim to neutrality and universality, the dominance of secular ontologies contributes to rather than ameliorates injustice, the question that remains is: what are the alternatives? The article concludes by exploring some preliminary responses to this question.     

Between political opportunities and strategic dilemmas: the choice of ‘double track’ by the activists of an occupied social centre in Italy

According to the political opportunity structure (POS) framework, mobilization tends to intensify when channels of access to the authorities open, leading the protest actors to hope for success. This happened during the protest campaign aimed at the reopening of the occupied Social Centre ‘Experia’ in Catania (Italy), after the eviction by police, because unexpectedly moderate centre-left political actors supported mobilization and the centre-right local government accepted to put the issue on the institutional agenda; nevertheless the social centre was not reopened. In order to explain why the mobilization was unsuccessful, we analysed the protest campaign combining the POS framework with the approach to strategic dilemmas by James Jasper; if opportunities and restraints of the political system influence the choices and behaviours of unconventional actors, in their turn the actions and decisions made by movement activists affect the POS. In this case, the social centre activists filtered the constraints and opportunities of the local political system through their cognitive lenses and faced some dilemmas (Naughty or Nice?, Extension, Shifting goals), whose strategic choices extended or reduced these constraints and opportunities, thus affecting the opening and closure of the POS. The failure of the solution attempted by the social centre activists to keep both options of the various dilemmas, i.e. the strategy of ‘double track’, demonstrates how it is very difficult to be successful by maintaining dilemmas rather than making the strategic choices they demand, when the local institutional POS is substantially closed.     

‘Entering the territory of incitement’: oppositionality and Africa South

Africa South was an anti‐apartheid journal edited by Ronald Segal which was published in South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This article explores the historical and political significance of Africa South and considers its implications for an understanding of ‘oppositionality’ in the post‐apartheid present. The central challenge which Africa South offered to its own context was its transnational perspective. Africa South was an important meeting place in the global routes of the developing pan‐African movement. It is also noteworthy for its effort to bring disparate areas of history and experience – both within the African continent and across the African diaspora – into revealing alignment with one another. The principle of conjuncture, I argue, initiated an important analytical move: the opportunity for illuminating comparison, the re‐conceptualisation of an often fragmented political and social landscape and an unusual glimpse of the whole. In tension with this totalising vision is the journal’s generic eclecticism, its flexible political identity and its collaborative construction. In both its unity and its fragmentation, Africa South offers an important point of departure for activist journalism and oppositional intellectual endeavours in the present.