‘Felons are also our family’: citizenship and solidarity in the undocumented youth movement in the United States

The undocumented youth movement began in the United States in the mid-2000s. Drawing on qualitative research with undocumented young organisers in California, this article explores how relationships between undocumented youth, the wider undocumented population, and legal citizens have been understood in narratives of citizenship in the movement over time. It is argued that, paradoxically, the movement’s retreat from prioritising a pathway to legal citizenship for the most ‘eligible’, made visible historic and contemporary ties to the United States and its peoples that are obscured in hegemonic narratives of contemporary citizenship. In becoming more inclusive of the wider undocumented population, positions of solidarity with marginalised US citizens have also emerged. In the context of attacks on some racialised and other marginalised social groups during Trump’s presidency, such solidarity is even more vital.     

The ‘illegal’ and the skilled: effects of media portrayals on perceptions of immigrants in Britain

Public perceptions often diverge widely from reality on the size and make-up of immigrant populations, with likely consequences for public opinion about immigration. Prior research has not established whether the media has any causal role in the construction of these perceptions. This paper examines whether and how actually occurring media portrayals of immigrants in Britain affect perceptions of immigrants among members of the British public. We begin by conducting a large-scale quantitative study of the British national press. We then report on an original survey experiment that tests for causal impact of news frames derived from the media study. Specifically, we focus on three depictions of immigrants: as ‘illegal’, Eastern European, or highly skilled. Results show that even subtle media interventions can shift public perceptions of immigration, in this case towards more realistic understandings of the overall size and make-up of the immigrant population in Britain. We suggest empirical, theoretical, and methodological implications for the study of media effects on public opinion towards immigration.     

Shi‘ism in the American Diaspora: Challenges and Opportunities

This paper examines the new diasporic jurisprudence or jurisprudence of minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyyāt) that has emerged within Shi‘i juridical circles. Shi‘i jurists (maraji‘) have responded to the needs of Shi‘i communities that live as minorities in the West by recasting Islamic legal discourse on Muslim minorities and reconciling Islamic legal categories to the demands of the times. New situations and contingencies have prompted the experts in the field to delve into the sources and to devise methodological devices in usul al-fiqh to enable them to deduce fresh juridical rulings in order to deal with novel problems and issues. The article will also argue that when facing new situations that cannot be located in the revelatory sources and do not have legal precedents, jurists can formulate judgments that will best protect the interests of the community while remaining faithful to the Islamic frame of reference. The paper also examines the various challenges that American Shi‘is encounter as they navigate their ways in the American socio-political milieu. These include the construction of ethnic borders within the community, political engagement, the community’s attempts at acculturation in the post-9/11 era and its engagement in academic discourse.     

Encounters between the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘oppressor’: rethinking Paulo Freire in anti-racist feminist education in Sweden

With the aim of rethinking Paulo Freire’s theory and its practices in race/ethnicity and education, this article uses intersectionality to deepen our understanding of differences among the oppressed and break the opposition between the oppressed and oppressor. Based on an ethnographic study carried out at a feminist adult educational institution in Sweden, the author examines the positionality of migrant students and feminist teachers and how they react to othering in the educational process and in Swedish society. The author also argues for the importance of intersectionality as a way to help both the conscientization of the oppressed and the radical task of the liberatory teachers. It is crucial to untangle gendered and sexualized racism, especially in specific contexts where race and gender intersect to construct a binary between a ‘superior us’ and a ‘barbaric Other.’ Conscientization and intersectionality are particularly useful for probing the complicated processes of othering and combating different forms of oppression and racism in an era of globalization in Western countries.     

‘Presentable’: the body and neoliberal subjecthood in contemporary India

The opening up of the Indian economy through a series of neoliberal reforms since 1991 ushered in processes of globalization that have led to a rapidly changing socio-cultural environment in India. Economic growth, globalizing discourses, and new consumer choices have driven desires for new global-yet-Indian identities. An emerging consumer agency has allowed for the embodiment and performance of these identities at the site of the body, even as new spaces of consumption have necessitated new bodily dispositions and practices. In this paper, I focus on how access to new commodities and discourses has affected understandings of the modern Indian body. In particular, I concentrate on appearance and the notion of exercising consumer agency to be ‘presentable’ as a lens through which to examine broader aspects of the body in the creation of neoliberal subjects in India.     

‘Always up for the craic’: young Irish professional migrants narrating ambiguous positioning in contemporary Britain

This paper explores the experiences of recent Irish highly qualified migrants who, having left post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, arrive in post-‘Peace Agreement’ Britain. Our paper contributes to understanding the enduring salience of place and how expressions of identities are framed by specific place-based factors as well as by temporality. We explore how these migrants’ narratives, as ‘successful’ professionals, are framed by complex intersections of historical legacies and changing socio-economic and intra-EU migration patterns. We consider the extent to which residual anti-Irish stereotypes remain, or indeed have re-emerged since the economic recession, and how these negative perceptions may impact on expressions of Irishness. Focusing on accents and other markers of identity, we discuss how Irishness may be constructed through a spectrum of visibilities at different times and in different places. This spatial-temporal perspective may help to go beyond a simplistic, one dimensional ethnic lens by highlighting the contextualities of identities.     

Ugandans in Britain Making ‘New’ Homes: Transnationalism,Place and Identity within Narratives of Integration

This article draws on substantial ethnographic data among Ugandans in Britain and Uganda. It takes a migrant-centred approach to its discussion to reflect the relationship between assumptions of integration and institutional, socio-cultural and socio-economic dimensions. This highlights colonial transnational practices that continue to inform migrants' everyday lives. The article shows how migrants' understanding of education as a vital component of social mobility and status is attributed to the legacy of British colonial administration. This means that, for Ugandans, the process of adaptation in the UK comes with a different set of connotations, as this heritage remains of key significance to migrants' expectations. Important dimensions to the interfaces between transnationalism and integration are shown to be labour-market participation and immigration status. Place and identity emerge as points of intersectionality where the negotiated nature of transnationalism and integration processes is revealed.     

Muslim Women in Australia,Britain and the United States: The Role of “Othering” and Biculturalism in Identity Formation

When Muslims migrate to Western countries, they bring their identity and culture with them. As they settle in their host countries, some Muslims encounter structural inequality, which is often revealed through media representation, unequal labour market status and racial profiling. Through the dynamics of structural inequality, some Muslim women remain doubly disadvantaged. Within their ethnic/religious community, Muslim women are expected to follow their cultural traditions and in the wider society their overtly Muslim appearance is often questioned. The discussion of identity formation in this paper is based on interviews with Muslim girls and women in Australia, Britain and the United States, aged between 15 and 30 years. Though the cultural and political contexts of these three countries are different, the practice of “othering” women have been similar. Through their life stories and narratives, I examine the formation of the participants’ identities. It was found that for many of these women their sense of identity shifted from single to multiple identities, thus revealing that identity formation was a flexible process that was affected by a variety of factors, including the relevance and importance of biculturalism in the women’s identity formation.     

Popular Culture and Politics: Whispers and the ‘Dramaturgy of Power’ in Kenya

Popular culture has become one of the most visible sites of critical social and political interpretation in post-colonial Africa. It is a site where an alternative public space is created and where various discourses; social, economic and political are invariably debated and negotiated. In many ways its various forms reflect, other times allegorize, fundamental transformation in society. In Kenya, a weekly newspaper column, Whispers, written by one of the country's most prolific fiction writers Wahome Mutahi, became arguably the most visible site of social, cultural and political expression for the last two decades, at a time when freedom to such expression was highly constrained by the state. The column echoed life in Kenya in all its banality but also in its distinctiveness. It interrogated a range of issues but most profoundly, the ‘performance of power’ in the country. Drawing from a pool of cultural resources and various forms of social and political culture, Whispers made legible the ambiguous interactions of ‘political performance’ in Kenya, how the subject population and the polity are all actors in a contradictory carnival of ‘mutual zombification’ which is at once empowering and disempowering. This paper engages with how fiction lays bare the intricacies of ‘political performance’ in the African postcolony using Kenya as a case study.     

Italian Americans in the ‘Bocce Belt’: ‘Old World’ memories and ‘New World’ identities

This essay examines the development of an ethnically and racially segregated resort landscape in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York in the twentieth century. Focusing on the history of Italian American resorts clustered primarily in Greene County, New York, it demonstrates that ethnicity continued to shape the social and cultural lives of many European immigrant New Yorkers and their families well after World War II. Ethnic resorts provided vacationers with an insulated recreational environment in which group identity and transatlantic ties – both real and imagined – could be fostered and sustained. However, the flexibility of these ethnic identities and the pervasive discrimination against African Americans at ethnic resorts in the 1940s and 1950s reveals the extent to which European Americans had largely internalized a sense of white ethnic identity by the postwar decades. The history of ethnic resorts in the Catskills sheds light on the process by which generations of European Americans in New York City negotiated these multiple ethnic, national, and racial identities.     

‘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.     

East-European immigrants responding to the recession in Britain: is there a trade-off between unemployment and over-qualification?

Most studies demonstrating the vulnerability of labour migrants following the recession have focused on unemployment. This article examines how the labour market performance of East-European workers in the U.K. has been affected by the recession by focussing on four possible employment outcomes: unemployment, self-employment, over-qualification and part-time jobs. By showing the relatively low rates of unemployment amongst East-European migrants, which have become even lower following the recession, it argues that the vulnerability of immigrants in periods of economic downturn cannot always be solely measured in higher rates of immigrant unemployment. Labour migrants may be prompted to take jobs (any jobs) below their skills and qualifications, thus suggesting a ‘trade-off’ between unemployment and over-qualification.     

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 devil is not in the detail: representational absence and stereotyping in the ‘Trojan Horse’ news story

Using content analysis, this study investigated the coverage of the Trojan Horse news story aiming to ascertain whether its representation by the British press emphasized ‘Islamist extremism’ over ‘poor school governance’. The sample coverage was extracted from five national newspapers and ranged from 9 June (the date of release of the Ofsted Advice Note) to 26 June 2014. Our analysis shows that the coverage reported evidence of Islamist ideology much more frequently (61.5%) than evidence of poor governance (38.5%). This suggests that the Trojan Horse news story was predominantly represented as a case of Islamist extremism and therefore covered in an unbalanced manner. Such a partial coverage relied on ideological dualisms and negative stereotypes to represent Islam and Muslims, and on the textual strategy of selecting some features (extremism) whilst omitting others (governors’ professional misconduct). This bias has arguably diverted attention away from systemic problems within the national school system whilst reinforcing Islamophobic discourses.     

‘Strange faces’ in the academy: experiences of racialized and Indigenous faculty in Canadian universities

This paper is based on a larger qualitative study of exclusion and belonging as experienced by members of marginalized groups in the professions. The current analysis draws on a subsample of 13 racialized and Indigenous academics at Canadian universities to examine their experiences of both everyday racism – subtle, almost intangible micro-level interactions that convey messages of not fully belonging – and overt racism and colonialism. Overt experiences were less common, though intensely painful. Though in some ways they are more straightforward to address, as they are more obvious, they also consume considerable time and energy. Instances of everyday racism and colonialism were more common, often intricately interwoven with the very fabric of the institutional culture. Their cumulative nature is exhausting. Diversity initiatives, while popular in contemporary universities, are failing to approach equity, in that they deny the need for change in institutional cultures.     

Whitewashing the nation: racist jokes and the construction of the African ‘other’ in Greek popular cinema

This article explores representations of race in three Greek popular films of the 1970s and 1980s. The portrayal of African characters in these films is antagonistically positioned in relation to the dominant, ‘whitewashed’ Greek national narrative which relies on the nineteenth century idea that Greece is the progenitor of European civilization. Often masquerading itself as ‘just a joke’, the discourse of these films narrates the African Other as lacking in terms of culture, intelligence and beauty – the three central categories upon which the idea of the ‘white supremacy’, according to Cornell West, is historically constructed in modernity. Tightly woven with this idea (largely introduced in Greece by the leading European powers), these films enunciate explicitly colonial viewpoints in a country that was neither a colonial power nor at the geopolitical center of the European project. The article argues that the racialized representations of these films are an effect of appropriating the Eurocentric idea of historicism, where the ‘progress’ and ‘backwardness’ of groups and nations are measured according to how effectively they perform the values of modernity.     

Sharks and Shylocks: Englishness and otherness in popular discourse on ‘the City’ 1870–1914

Despite its hegemony as a financial centre, the City of London occupied a relatively minor place in the discourse of British imperialism. Periodic collapses and scandals made the City an inscrutable source of anxiety, engendering a need to distance it from the mainstream of national life. This distancing centred on doubts about the City’s national identity, stemming from its increasingly cosmopolitan interests and its contingent of prominent Jews, who were conventionally understood to have no nationality. Scrutiny of discourse on the City leads to a richer understanding of the role of ‘Semitic discourse’ in the construction of British national identity.     

Imagining a Homeland: Constructing Heimat in the German East, 1871–1914

Germany has a long history of political fragmentation, with regional (Heimat) identities playing a critical role in the formation of the national consciousness. The process of rallying local identities to the nation is being examined in the western parts of Germany, but the east remains largely unexplored. Addressing this issue is important because studies of the Heimat movement have challenged received notions about the character of nationalism in imperial Germany. This article illustrates the special challenges Heimat activists—especially Hugo Conwentz—faced in fashioning a regional identity in the German east, and compares their efforts to those in the west.