Migrants’ class and parenting: the role of cultural capital in Migrants’ inequalities in education

Although scholars consistently show that class-specific parenting, influenced by the resources parents have due to their socio-economic position, is one of the most important factors for children’s different life chances and outcomes as adults, migrants’ parenting is usually analysed with a focus on their ethnicity or country of origin. Building on cultural perspectives on class, this study demonstrates that migrant parents are differently endowed with institutionalised and embodied cultural capital, which shapes their parenting and therewith their children’s educational opportunities. Specifically, parents differ in their trust in school authorities, the way they define their own role in shaping their children’s education, and their self-esteem and confidence in assessing their children’s abilities and performance. This study is based on the accounts of parents who migrated from Poland to Germany and shows that due to their class position, middle-class parents possess robust forms of cultural capital that they can transfer to their children in the context of migration. This finding makes a case for the relevance of class in the context of migration and thereby adds an important perspective to the study of migrants’ inequalities in education, which tends to focus on ‘ethnic’ differences between migrants and ‘natives’.     

Between international student mobility and work migration: experiences of students from EU’s newer member states in Denmark

ABSTRACT

Since 2009, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of students from EU’s newer member states, who enrol as full-degree students at Danish universities. Attracted by the fee-free access to highly ranked universities, these students often arrive with dreams of creating better lives for themselves, and of accumulating Western educational capital. Students from the EU’s newer member states are usually reliant on jobs to sustain themselves in Denmark. However, many find it hard to get regular jobs, and some of them become trapped in semi-legal employment or in low-status, low-paid jobs. Drawing on empirical material collected during a long-term ethnographic fieldwork among full-degree students attending English-medium MA-programmes at a Danish university, this article explores how students from the EU’s newer member states make sense of their lives as students and workers in Denmark, and how they respond to experiences of unequal access to student jobs.     

‘Let’s make a little drum’: limitations and contradictory effects of cultural approaches in Indigenous education

Initiatives to improve low levels of educational attainment amongst Indigenous students in the Canadian Prairies have long emphasized cultural approaches and ignored how racism affects achievement. Taking up the debates offered by critical race theory, and utilizing post-structural theorizing of knowledge and subjectivities, this article provides a discourse analysis of educators’ contradictory deployments of cultural discourses. The analysis highlights the inadequacy of cultural narratives for explaining the inequality experienced by Indigenous students. I show how naming racism in schools is difficult for teachers because cultural integration efforts are taken as evidence that equality is being achieved, and I trace the ways in which this leads to the naturalization of schooling exclusions and unequal subjectivities. Readers are brought to rethink the integration of Indigenous culture in schools as a singular pathway to student success, and the importance of centering race and racism.     

‘We are chameleons’: identity capital in a multicultural workplace

This exploratory research investigates ‘identity capital’ in a multicultural workplace environment. Guided by Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical approach to capital and James Côté's concept of identity capital, we examine the strategic deployment of identity capital among adults in a multicultural immigrant-serving organization in Mississauga, serving the region of Peel, Ontario. The study involves 15 personal interviews with staff of this organization. The findings show that identity capital is deployed in social situations with clients, colleagues, and supervisor in the workplace. Moreover, the deployment of identity capital occurs through greetings, body language, finding connecting pieces, and methods of communication. Finally, the deployment of identity capital is strategic. The paper concludes that identity capital is a useful concept to explain the varied resources individuals have available to negotiate changing workplace environments.     

Inventing a city: cultural citizenship in ‘Słubfurt’

This article is an in-depth exploration of local efforts to build a transnational sense of cultural citizenship in the border cities of Frankfurt(Oder), Germany and S?ubice, Poland. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2006, this article focuses on the various strategies and activities of ‘S?ubfurt’, a community-based NGO with the goal of redefining S?ubice and Frankfurt(Oder) as a unified social space. In pursuing this goal, S?ubfurt engages with European Union-wide social and political dynamics aimed at enhancing international cooperation and integration by de-emphasizing national borders and promoting a transnational sense of ‘European’ identity. This article therefore addresses the interplay between local cultural politics and the tactics and techniques of supranational forms of governmentality, and examines attempts to establish new symbols, events, practices and traditions that support the development of a cross-border community identity and cultural citizenship within the two cities.     

Beauty as violence: ‘beautiful’ hair and the cultural violence of identity erasure

Curious observations of hair and hairstyles worn by many women of Black African descent reveal the triumph of a Eurocentric dominant ideology of beauty. I assert in this study that the process of attaining the hegemonic ideology of ‘beautiful’ hair, often defined as a European and Asian texture and style of hair, is a violent journey. This study draws largely from Johan Galtung's seminal theoretical works on violence, particularly his articulation of cultural violence as a creation of ideology through psychological process of indoctrination and brainwashing, and the internalization of this process. From this theoretical framing, and a demythologization of the multiplicity and flexibility narrative of postmodern self and identity, this study examines the attitudes of young Black South African women toward their natural hair and their perception of ‘beautiful’ hair. Through a survey of 159 Black female students in a rural South African university with a predominantly Black student population, and face-to-face conversations with five female students, the study asserts that many Black African women's relationship with their hair is shaped by violence. The physical and cultural violence perpetuated in the quest for ‘beautiful’ hair is consequently creating a generational cycle of identity erasure.     

Strangers within? Russian-speakers’ migration from Latvia to London: a study in power geometry and intersectionality

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to contribute to debates on ethnic identification and migration through a focus on a specific group – Russian-speakers from the Baltic state of Latvia who have migrated to the UK. Twenty-six interviews with members of this group were gathered in London and the wider metropolitan area during 2012 and 2014. Russian-speakers represent uniquely combined configurations of ‘the other within’: in most cases, they are EU citizens with full rights; yet, some still hold non-citizens’ passports of Latvia. While in Latvian politics Russian-speakers are framed as ‘others’ whose identities are shaped by the influence of Russia, interview findings confirm that they do not display belonging to contemporary Russia. However, London is the ‘third space’ – a multicultural European metropolis – which provides new opportunities for negotiating ethnic identification. Against the background of triple ‘alienation’ (from Latvia, from Russia and from the UK), we analyse how ethnicity is narrated intersectionally with other categories such as age and class. The findings show that Russian-speaking migrants from Latvia mobilise their Europeanness and Russianness beyond alienating notions of (ethno)national identity. The paper also demonstrates that being open to ethnicity as a category of practice helps us towards a progressive conceptualisation of often overlooked dimensions of integration of intra-EU linguistic ‘others’.     

Out-migration,social capital and the cooperative dilemma: evidence from Bulgaria’s population crisis

This study examines the effects of out-migration on social capital in sending communities. I first conceptualise social capital as the presence of social trust and engagement at the individual-level of analysis. Drawing from established theories of cooperation, I then argue that subnational out-migration acts as a structural-level signal that changes people’s incentives to trust others and engage in social activities. I use the current migration crisis in Bulgaria to test this argument. Findings from multi-level models that combine cross-sectional survey data and subnational migration flows indicate that high out-migration is correlated with lower levels of generalised trust. Out-migration is also associated with higher frequencies of informal social engagement, indicating that people rely more on their immediate social networks in environments of heavy out-migration. The overall evidence suggests that out-migration is a threat to social capital in sending communities.     

‘Both an Arab and a woman’: gendered,racialised experiences of female Palestinian citizens of Israel

Following feminist and postcolonial discourses, this paper uses the concept of ‘everyday experience’ as a tool to trace the social world of educated Palestinian women in Israel. The term refers to the complex array of these women's experiences in racialised and gendered social sites, as well as within the class, religious, and ethnic contexts in the subordinated group and its relations with the dominant Jewish group. Based on 108 in‐depth interviews with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, the paper claims that educated Palestinian women are located in a ‘third place’ between cultural, gender, class, national and racial structures that generates a continual ambivalence. Within this marginal, ‘unhomely’ space women negotiate their own identities and challenge dominant social definitions. Women create various modes of interim spaces and multi‐dimensional, shifting identities for themselves. The ambivalent attitudes generated by the women's experiences expose the possibility of shedding categorising markers. The omnipresent existence of the gendered, racialised regime of knowledge makes every place a potential site of subversion and resistance.     

One narrative or several? Politics,cultural elites,and citizens in constructing a ‘New Narrative for Europe’

ABSTRACT

European Union (EU) institutions have cultivated narratives of European integration for a long time. For its 2013–2014 ‘A New Narrative for Europe’ project, however, the European Commission for the first time explicitly used the ‘narrative’ label. Drawing on non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews and qualitative discourse analysis, this article contrasts the drafting process and the resulting declaration’s narrative structure and content with its discussion by citizens in a web-based consultation. The analysis shows that participating citizens forcefully demanded a bottom-up debate and advocated pluralistic perspectives. In these circumstances, elite-driven attempts at strengthening European identity and EU legitimacy are likely to be ineffective.     

Palestine as ‘a state of mind’: second-generation Polish and British Palestinians’ search for home and belonging

This article reflects on the ways in which children of Palestinian exiles born in Poland and the UK relate to their ancestral homeland and how they make sense of their Palestinian inheritance in the present. It argues that while the second generation of Palestinian diasporic subjects maintain links with their parents’ homeland these connections are not limited to the intergenerational transmission of cultural identity. The article explores how Palestine ‘becomes’ important for second-generation Palestinians. It argues that it is the re-occurring waves of violence inflicted on Palestinians that activate and shape their engagement with Palestine. Rather than a sense of attachment based exclusively on a personal connection with ancestral ‘roots’, the article argues that the second generation also develop a sense of long-distance post-nationalism that transforms their connection with Palestine into a more universal endeavour for justice and against the dispossession. These arguments are based on the findings of a two-year multi-sited ethnography which involved oral history interviews with 35 Palestinians of different generations, carried out in Poland and in the UK, including 15 interviews with second-generation Palestinians, as well as site-specific field visits in Israel and Palestine and follow-up ‘return’ interviews.     

Identity and gender in cultural transitions: returning home from higher education as ‘internal immigration’ among Bedouin and Druze women in Israel

This paper examines the phenomenon of the return of Bedouin and Druze women from studies in Israeli universities to their homes and culture, focusing on the perspective of the psychological changes they experienced in their identity. Entering the university, located in the Jewish-Israeli space (in central cities in Israel), constitutes entry into a new and different cultural world that exposes these women to values and norms different from those of their culture of origin. The identity formed as a result of their encounter with and exposure to a world that was unfamiliar to them and the return thereafter to their villages entail changes in gender identity. Not only are they ‘different’ from the way they were before they left; they often feel like ‘internal immigrants’ within their own culture. A deeper understanding of these effects would enhance comprehension of the emotional processes and identity changes undergone by women from non-Western cultures who obtain higher education.     

In the name of Ossian: Celtic Galicia and the ‘brothers from the north’

ABSTRACT

The modern Celtic myth is a complex framework because of its variety of constituent elements. In essence, it consists of an empathetic celebration of otherness, based on a timeless narrative and restorative nostalgia, but including nationalist and capitalist-market interests. Since the first edition of the Ossianic poems by James Macpherson in 1760, Celticness has firmly settled within a collective imagination in search of alternative aesthetic, political, and even spiritual values. It has been exploited in different geocultural spaces and articulated in propaganda strategies, to found ethnic consciousness and fill the gaps of history. In addition to other Celtic areas of Europe, Galicia (NW Spain) has a long Celtophile tradition, with relevant intellectual support, ritual symbologies, and media productions. This article focuses on Galician Celtic-based history, icons, events, phenomena like the Real Banda of bagpipes, the Interceltic Festival of Ortigueira, and the renewed archaeological attempt to locate Galician ancestry within Iron Age Celts. Celticness has been the main identity locus in the construction of Galicia as a nation, shaping a specific social awareness and even invoking racial arguments. Comparison is established with Scotland, Brittany and Ireland (the ‘brothers from the north’) in their respective perception and treatment of modern Celticness.     

Home and belonging: a comparative study of 1.5 and second-generation Egyptian ‘expatriates’ in Qatar and ‘immigrants’ in the U.S.

This article compares how two different migration models – legal permanence and legal temporary settlement – shape 1.5 and second-generation Egyptians’ feelings of belonging towards the host countries of the U.S. and Qatar. Relying on formal semi-structured interviews, I argue that the inability of Egyptians in Qatar to obtain Qatari citizenship contributes greatly to their lack of sense of belonging to Qatar. However, a central paradox appears when Egyptians in Qatar simultaneously discuss other factors, such as family and/or friends’ networks, comfort, safety, and country familiarity, which make them feel Qatar is home. Conversely, while Egyptian-Americans appear to be more confident with their host country relationship because of their experience in a country of immigrants, factors such as post-9/11 discrimination and U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East complicate their relationship with the U.S. Both groups reflect simultaneous feelings of home, belonging, discrimination, and/or exclusion in their respective ‘host’ countries but in different ways. These case studies demonstrate that different migration models do not necessarily lead to predicted understandings of home and belonging. This article thus argues for the need to reassess the assumptions we have of the relationship between citizenship and belonging.     

The construction of ‘illiterate’ and ‘literate’ youth: the effects of high-stakes standardized literacy testing

High-stakes standardized literacy testing is not neutral and continues to build upon the legacy of dominant power relations in the state in its ability to sort, select and rank students and ultimately produce and name some youth as illiterate in contrast to an ideal white, male, literate citizen. I trace the effects of high-stakes standardized testing by using the voices of 16 youth who failed the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) to illustrate how the ‘illiterate youth’ revealed to students, schools, and communities by this test is culturally and socially constructed. In an age where multiple literacies are more and more valued, standardized literacy testing acts as a form of social control projected upon the ‘adolescent’ body that has historically been deemed ‘other’ or ‘deficient.’ Just as colonized subjects needed to be ‘civilized,’ so youth now need to acquire a state defined literacy in a competitive and fast paced learning environment. This article helps to demonstrate how power operates on marginalized youth through standardized literacy testing that is being used transnationally.     

Dignity,happiness and being able to live a ‘normal life’ in the UK – an examination of post-accession Polish migrants' transnational autobiographical fields

This article examines data from a qualitative study of post-accession Polish migrants living in the UK. We examine themes from our interviews such as ‘dignity’, ‘normality’, ‘happiness’ and the ‘affordability’ and ‘ease’ of life in the UK (compared to Poland). We focus on the autobiographical or intra-personal discursive practices that define what Habib calls migrants' continuing relationship with their ‘homeland’. We draw on Emirbayer and Mische's analysis of the relationship between ‘agency’ and what they call ‘embedded temporalities’ to examine the interaction between our participants' recollections of life in Poland and their evaluation of their present lives in the UK in order to examine the impact of these on their future plans (to stay in the UK or return to Poland). We locate this analysis in what we call a transnational autobiographical field which is a modification of what Levitt and Glick Schiller call a transnational social field. Rather than examine, for example, how decisions to migrate, settle and re-migrate are embedded in inter or trans-personal social relations and networks, in this article we examine the self-dynamics associated with our participants' articulation of their intra-personal and autobiographical embedded temporalities. Our argument is that articulations of individuals' pasts, presents and anticipated futures are also significant factors shaping their migration, settlement, and re-migration decisions.     

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

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

The ‘isolated ethnics’ and ‘everyday ethnics’: region,identity, and the second-generation Midwest Asian American experience

While studies have documented the Asian American experience in the past two decades, a dearth of research exists on those who grew up in the Midwest. How do Midwest Asian Americans experience their co-ethnic community, culture and pan-ethnic identity? Drawing from in-depth interviews of second-generation Midwest Asian Americans, an analysis of the data reveals two patterns of experiences, including: isolated ethnics and everyday ethnics. The findings are framed around issue of ‘access points’ to the co-ethnic community, and its influence on ethnic identity formation. This research highlights the importance of geographic community context on acculturation of Midwest Asian Americans.     

Contamination,deception and ‘othering’: the media framing of the horsemeat scandal

Food and consumption practices are cultural symbols of communities, nations, identity and a collective imaginary which bind people in complex ways. The media framed the 2013 horsemeat scandal by fusing discourses beyond the politics of food. Three recurrent media frames and dominant discourses converged with wider political debates and cultural stereotypes in circulation in the media around immigration and intertextual discourse on historical food scandals. What this reveals is how food consumption and food-related scandals give rise to affective media debates and frames which invoke fear of the other and the transgression of a sacred British identity, often juxtaposing ‘Britishness’ with a constructed ‘Otherness’.