Limits of Social Capital for Refugee Integration: The Case of Gay Iranian Male Refugees' Integration in Canada

Each year thousands of refugees, including racialized LGBT refugees, are resettled in Canada. Currently, economic independence is the foremost policy goal in integrating Canada's refugees. This policy often relies on social capital as a non-economic solution to integration. I draw on 35 multi-sequential interviews with 19 gay Iranian men to connect the empirical and theoretical debates around refugee integration and argue that over-reliance on refugees' deployment of social capital for integration has grave shortcomings for their senses of belonging. I suggest that examining racialized LGBT refugees' integration strategies best reveals communitarian social capital's flaws at the conjunction of sexuality, gender, race, and class. I draw on Bourdieu's writings on social capital to highlight internal group differences, social inequalities, and the vital convertibility between financial, social, and cultural capital in building transferrable resources for refugee integration. I conclude by urging policy-oriented studies of social capital.     

Troubled Pastures,Troubled Pictures: French Agriculture and Contemporary Rural Sociology

Abstract In contrast to those of other industrialized western European countries, France's agricultural community continued to represent the majority of the national population for a long time and only became one of many minority groups at the end of the twentieth century. It then came under the influence of various trends, sometimes conflicting but nevertheless presenting a certain sociological and political unity. With the weakening of the demographic, territorial, economic, and political foundations of the French agricultural population, rural sociologists are now required to present a new analysis and a revised assessment of its position in French society. The object of this article is to promote better understanding of the reasons behind the blurring of images and representations associated with French agriculture. It invites readers to review and understand the different facets of an imagery that presents a paradox compared with the ideological constructs associated with the historical record of farming and the farming profession. Working in the tradition of the French school of rural sociology, we have set out to offer a sense of the social realities that now represent the main areas of analysis for French and European rural sociology.     

A historical perspective on the working contributions of children in britain: 1800-1914

This paper considers the work of children and their contribution to modern societies by looking at this from a historical perspective. Children's work today is often characterised as being little and of no consequence, while it is expected that children should enjoy a childhood free from the cares and worries of the adult working population. In this article I show how children's experience of work moved from the 'public' world of the street and workplace outside the home, to one where children's work is centred in the 'private' realm of the home and school. Children were denied the status and benefits associated with receiving a wage and were therefore a role assumed to be dependent upon others and undervalued. It is argued that children's place in society is similarly devalued and their contributions to the reproduction of that society marginalised. Children's activities and contributions are merely represented as being unworthy of any kind of economic, political or legal reward. The subsequent exclusion from social, economic and political reward separates children from the independence normally enjoyed by adults. While not of course condoning the exploitation of children, or even suggesting that children today are not entitled to a time where they are free of the burdens of paid work, I discuss how children's contributions are redefined, undermined and undervalued. I do so by focusing on the experience of the city of Manchester between 1800 and 1914, and the effects of the slow introduction of legislation curbing children's paid work.     

Moscow Architecture between Stalinism and Modernism

Recent changes in Moscow's urban structure combine the post-Soviet and the early Soviet aesthetical and ideological patterns in a very contradictory way. The master plan of 2004 with its vision of the ‘‘new capital’’ of the year 2020, is essentially orientated along the lines of its 1935 predecessor. Striking similarity of the mechanisms of the visual celebration of Moscow as a capital city of Russian Federation is, however, based on the opposite economies. The goals of a representative architecture in Moscow are being intertwined with the demands of a new economic settings for architectural planning. The choice of architecture from the 1930s and 1950s as a pattern of orientation for some buildings planned for the most prominent spaces in Moscow is seen here as an oscillation between traditionalism and modernism, considered in the context of political discourses and urban policy.     

Straight out the barrio: Ozomatli and the importance of place in the formation of Chicano/a popular culture in Los Angeles

Abstract

Ozomatli's history of formation, the multiplicity of its sounds, the role played by its music in enabling political activism and political coalitions illuminate the relations between identities and politics at the present moment. The group is grounded in Los Angeles contemporary Chicano/a culture and in the new social relations, new knowledges, and new sensibilities of an emerging global city in a transnational era. Speaking from the interstices between commercial culture and the new social movements, Ozomatli's music and political work offers us invaluable bottom‐up perspectives on the terrain of counter‐politics and cultural creation at the beginning of the twenty‐first century.     

The nightmares of the heteronormative

Abstract

Race and sexuality have always intersected in African‐American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African‐American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African‐American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African‐American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African‐American racial difference and worked to exclude African‐Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African‐American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African‐Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.     

ETHNIC IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL CAPITAL: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF CHINESE OPERA IN SINGAPORE

This article weaves the trajectory of Chinese opera in Singapore with the country's political development. Starting in 1965, the year of Singapore's independence, it attempts to debunk the myth that national culture is resistant to global culture by describing the state's systematic erosion of local culture. From the late 1970s onward, with economic progress, state fears of “Westernisation” led to a centring of Chinese culture in national culture; this was followed by a mini-revival of Chinese opera that coincided with the emergence of Confucian ethics as national discourse and as a culturalist explanation for the “Asian miracle” of the 1980s. This article shows that globalisation's effect on local cultures is not a straightforward process. Instead, it is a complex relationship where the flourishing of a local culture depends on the changing recognition and valuation of cultural identities, ethnicity, and language as cultural capital. This in turn implicates the structural features of national policies and globalisation processes that determine the recognition and valuation of this cultural capital. The use of “cultural capital” as a conceptual tool to isolate the cultural and social components of Chinese opera demonstrates that a local culture flourishes or withers according to the effects of globalisation and national policies on such cultural and social factors.     

Military technology and socio-cultural change in the ancient Greek city1

The political culture of classical Greek civilization, with its distinctive twin ideals of citizenship and mass participatory democracy, represents a revolutionary development in the history of human society. The social origins of that momentous cultural breakthrough are examined in this essay, with specific attention being given to those forces – destructive as well as reorganizing – which undermined the bases of traditional aristocratic domination and which prepared the ground for the emergence of new institutional patterns. Pressures for structural and normative ‘democratization are shown to have been exerted primarily by changes in the military domain, the central axis of political and economic power within the ancient city.     

TEXTURES OF THE MODERN: VIENNESE CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL HISTORY AND URBAN STUDIES

The following essay recapitulates the findings of a research project on Viennese modernity, which since 1995 has involved a group of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and sociologists examining the different phases in the history of the city in the twentieth century from a transdisciplinary perspective. The point of departure for the project was its participants' dissatisfaction with a myopic image of twentieth-century Vienna increasingly constricted to literary and aesthetic practices, which has focused on the ‘golden age’ of high culture in the Habsburg capital of the fin-de-siècle while omitting crucial periods of the city's history, in particular the political and cultural crisis between 1918 and 1938, and the phase of material and cultural reconstruction after the ‘collapse of civilization’ that was Nazism.     

Transforming the public sphere: the case of Moscow’s city libraries

ABSTRACT

This article aims to explore the link between civil society and the public sphere in present-day Russia by studying a recent library reform project in Moscow. In 2013, a comprehensive reconstruction of Moscow's network of 448 public libraries was initiated by a group of intellectuals, architects and urbanists. The project team aimed at modernizing Moscow's city libraries by making them more accessible and appealing to the public. The reconstruction gained support from the city administration that sought to strengthen the function of public libraries as cultural and educational institutions and, at the same time, improve the city's image in the eyes of its citizens. The article poses the question of whether this reform has been successful in making Moscow's city libraries more open, accessible and inviting for the public, and whether the reform has contributed to the development of a public sphere in the city by providing new spaces for participation and civic engagement. The article explores the reform process based on interviews with key informants and document analysis. It looks into the project objectives, its implementation process and its legacy. The analysis of the library reform project revealed contradictory results, as the reform did not develop beyond the pilot phase, but was stopped due to fading support from the city administration. Overall, the library reform thus remained an unfinished process. For developing the public sphere, the legacy of the reform project is ambivalent. On the one hand, the project has proved that creating new public spaces in Moscow is possible. On the other hand, it showed that the public sphere remains limited in today's Russia, as civic initiatives cannot develop beyond a cultural niche project. Due to a lack of political support for societal pluralism, a true autonomous public sphere remains beyond reach in present-day Russia.     

Employment, individualization and insecurity: rethinking the risk society perspective

German sociologist Ulrich Beck maintains that economic, technological and environmental transitions have radically reshaped employment relations in Western Europe. Whilst theories of employment transformation are historically ubiquitous, Beck's contribution is rather unique. Utilising risk as a lens through which subterranean shifts in employment, the economy and society can be visualised, Beck's work has been heralded as a significant theoretical landmark. The risk society perspective emphasizes the diffusion of two interlinked macro‐social processes. Firstly, Beck identifies a sweeping process of individualization which recursively generates personal insecurity and reflexive decision‐making. Secondly, changes in the relationship between capital and labour are said to have facilitated an underlying shift in the pattern of social distribution. This paper scrutinises Beck's understanding of these two processes, as a means of developing a broader critique of the risk society perspective. Theoretically, it will be argued that Beck deploys unsophisticated and artificial categories, amalgamates disparate forms of risk and compacts together diverse employment experiences. Empirically, the paper demonstrates that – far from being directed by a universal axis of risk – labour market inequalities follow the grooves etched by traditional forms of stratification.     

Immigration and the New Racial Diversity in Rural America*

This article highlights the new racial and ethnic diversity in rural America, which may be the most important but least anticipated population shift in recent demographic history. Ethnoracial change is central to virtually every aspect of rural America over the foreseeable future: agro‐food systems, community life, labor force change, economic development, schools and schooling, demographic change, intergroup relations, and politics. The goal here is to plainly illustrate how America's racial and ethnic transformation has emerged as an important dimension of ongoing U.S. urbanization and urbanism, growing cultural and economic heterogeneity, and a putative “decline in community” in rural America. Rural communities provide a natural laboratory for better understanding the implications of uneven settlement and racial diversity, acculturation, and economic and political incorporation among Hispanic newcomers. This article raises the prospect of a new racial balkanization and outlines key impediments to full incorporation of Hispanics into rural and small town community life. Immigration and the new ethnoracial diversity will be at the leading edge of major changes in rural community life as the nation moves toward becoming a majority‐minority society by 2042.     

Migrants and Changing Urban Periphery: Social Relations, Cultural Diversity and the Public Space in Istanbul's New Neighbourhoods

This study examines the dynamics of socio-cultural change in a peripheral neighbourhood in Istanbul, an "edge city" that is ethnically mixed, culturally heterogeneous, socially differentiated and spatially multi-functional. One major focus in the study is the changing nature of social relations in traditional groups. Though kinship, hemşeri (place of origin) and neighbourhood solidarity is still crucial in the lives of the migrants, participation in these groups becomes more voluntary and the ties among members less obligatory. Secondly, the ethnic and religious groupings in the neighbourhood are not always exclusive, authoritarian and patriarchal communities. What generally appears as rigid communitarian fragmentation is often one of cultural diversity for the residents of the locality. The associational pluralism that exists in the neighbourhood enables people to claim multiple ethnic, religious, political and cultural identities. Thirdly, though they compare unfavourably with their middle class counterparts in the city, the new neighbourhoods provide greater opportunities and more public space for interaction among the members of the locality than for instance, the rural communities. The study also questions the often taken-for-granted image of a rigidly polarized city in view of empirical evidence that indicates the multiple and complex economic and political links between the new neighbourhoods and the broader urban society. Finally, isolation from middle class areas in the city does not necessarily lead to the exclusion of the whole peripheral urban population from urban life, urban institutions and urban culture. These become increasingly present in the new neighbourhoods and available for the majority of the residents. The main conclusion is that Istanbul contains a number of such edge cities, which have powerful integrating and urbanizing influences on individuals.     

Transnational family strategies and education in the contemporary Chinese diaspora

Abstract In this article I examine the role of education in the family strategies of recent East Asian migrants, contributing to intellectual debates around transnationalism and the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Empirically, the article provides an insight into the experiences and objectives of an often‐neglected group within studies of Chinese migration – students. I also attempt to understand the particular role that children play within a wider family project of capital accumulation. Drawing upon the work of Bourdieu, I emphasize the significance of different forms of capital in underpinning the spatial strategies of East Asian families. The research for this article was conducted in Vancouver, Canada and Hong Kong, involving in‐depth interviews with university students, recent graduates and their families. In conclusion, in the article I maintain that a geographically informed theory of ‘cultural capital’ and its relationship to the family unit can help elucidate recent patterns of trans‐Pacific, transnational mobility, moving beyond more common ‘political’ and ‘economic’ interpretations of this contemporary migration.     

Post/past-'Orientalism' Orientalism and its dis/re-orientation

Abstract

In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said articulated more a cultural filter than a cultural divide, through a catalog of historical documents on the west's representation of the east, enabling readers to share a vocabulary that has now become a part of American intellectual history. In the last quarter century Orientalism has acquired a 'symbolic value' that was at best present as a 'potential value', thus realizing itself; from its initial position as an object of cultural study it has now become a subject imbued with the agency to change perception and understanding. It has problematized Orientalism itself and associated issues of the new globalism, such as immigration, diaspora, boundary crossings, cross-border terrorism, mixed ethnicities, international and inter-racial adoptions, and travel. The article focuses on the new social, political and economic faces of the old Orientalist attitudes, and calls for a radical revision of history.     

Paradigm of ‘better life’: ‘development’ among the Khumi in the Chittagong Hill Tracts

Development is conventionally understood in various ways including economic growth, increase of gross domestic product (GDP), rise of per-capita income, improvement of social facilities, political stabilities, and women's empowerment and many other issues, but it finally means bringing positive changes in the life of people. However, development is always contextual because the notion and nature of development often varies from society to society depending on the context of local–societal dynamics. Therefore what is regarded globally accepted model of development can be challenged by the local discourse of development, since local-level perception could contest the universal model. This article addresses such a case of development which is conceptualised from the social and cultural point of view amid everyday experiences of ordinary people's lives. The article contextualises its argument with specific reference to the Khumi people living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.     

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE POLITICAL PROCESS: Movements, Corporations, and the State

I explore two questions in this article: (1) How has the role of the U.S. state in the political process changed vis‐à‐vis corporations? (2) What tactical repertoires have movements devised to confront this changing political process? Through the lens of the U.S. environmental movement, I find that (1) the state's policy‐making authority has weakened as corporations have become both policy makers and the new targets of challengers, (2) the environmental movement has devised organizing strategies–such as corporate‐community compacts or good neighbor agreements–to respond to and influence this new political process, and (3) those segments of the movement that ignore the political economic process are likely to meet with failure. These changes in the political economy constitute a challenge for the political process model. I therefore propose a “political economic process’ perspective to extend the political process model and more accurately capture these dynamics. The political economic process perspective evaluates four state‐centric assumptions of the political process model (the state as the primary movement target or vehicle of reform, the state policy‐making monopoly, capital as just another interest group, and the primacy of the nation‐state level of analysis) and demonstrates that the political economic process has changed in dramatic ways.     

Do ‘his’ education and class matter? The changing effect of the husband on women's labour‐market transitions in Italy and Britain

A new stream of sociological and demographic theory emphasizes individualization as the key process in late modernity. As maintained by Hakim ( 2000 ), women also have increasingly become agents of their own biographies, less influenced by the social class and the family. In this study, I intend to contribute to this debate by analysing how, in Italy and Britain, women's movements between employment and housework are linked to their husband's education and class, and how this link has changed across cohorts. Using discrete‐time event‐history modelling on the BHPS and ILFI, my findings show that in both countries, if the woman's educational and labour‐market profile is controlled for, the husband's occupation and education have lost importance. Yet, although based more on ‘her’ than ‘his’ profile, divisions along ‘classic’ lines are still evident and not context‐free, and they assume different forms in the two countries with distinctive institutional and cultural settings. In ‘liberal’ Britain, women's labour‐market participation responds more to motherhood and class than to education, while in ‘familistic’ Italy education seems more important, which suggests the existence of returns over and above strictly human capital/economic ones.     

Shaimiev's 'Khanate' on the Volga and its Russian Subjects

This paper examines some aspects of post-Soviet transition in Tatarstan, one of 21 ethnic autonomous republics of the Russian Federation, the population of which is almost equally divided between Tatars, Russia's largest ethnic and religious minority, and Russians. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Tatarstan together with Chechnya championed a fundamental reform of the rigid 'centre—periphery' relations with Russia. The Tatarstan leader Mintimir Shaimiev has exploited the post-Soviet weakening of the federal centre, as well as the incompetence of successive Yeltsin governments in national and regional policies, to secure a special relationship between Kazan and Moscow. In 1994, Tatarstan's special status was legitimised by a power-sharing Treaty which, both within post-Communist Russia and internationally, has been termed the 'Tatarstan model'. The Treaty secured for the Tatarstan leadership considerable independence from the Kremlin and allowed Kazan to establish direct economic and political links with the outside world. Domestically, the 'Tatarstan model' has been presented as a more viable and less painful form of transition to a post-Communist society. In the inter-ethnic sphere also, it has claimed to represent a model of transformation into a modern, democratic, civic nation of Tatarstanis. The widely accepted image of Tatarstan as a society successfully negotiating the transition from Communism conceals, however, far less attractive political, economic and cultural realities. This analysis, which is based on 2 years of field research, offers evidence that President Shaimiev has used Tatarstan's unique status to create an authoritarian regime, to manipulate and neutralise the forces of Tatar radical nationalism and to discriminate at all levels against the Russians of Tatarstan.     

Trends in the Relative Influence of Education and Income on Highbrow Taste, 1982–2012

Although numerous studies have confirmed the separate effects of economic and cultural capital on arts participation, research focusing on the cumulative and interactive effects of economic and cultural capital through the creation of taste publics is limited. Using data from the United States (Survey of Public Participation in the Arts [1982–2012]), this research integrates economic and cultural capital—measured as income and education—into the analysis of taste, creates taste publics, and examines their association with highbrow arts participation over time. We find that the effects of economic and cultural capital on highbrow arts participation decreased between 1982 and 2012, and American publics seem to have converged across both types of capital. Implications of the findings are discussed.