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Other Mothers: Encountering In/Visible Femininities in Migration and Urban Contexts
Abstract
Whereas much has been written about migrants’ visibility, the multiple and complex layers of migrants’ invisibility invite further exploration. Migrants’ in/visibility is not clear-cut: it differs across various locations and, as such, demands a comparative, intersectional analysis. This paper seeks to explore it by investigating how recent migrants make sense of their own appearance, as well as those of others they encounter in their new places of residence. Specifically, I inquire into the notion of femininity as it is performed and perceived by Polish migrant mothers living in German and British cities. I discuss whose performances of femininity are visible and whose femininity is rendered invisible in the eyes of my research participants, and what implications this may carry for urban and migration research. Strikingly, the women I interviewed only seem to recognise white British and German women’s performances of femininity for what they are. Non-white and Muslim femininities remain, at best, invisible or, in the not infrequent cases of racism and Islamophobia, are stripped not only of their unique gendered features, but of humanity altogether. As seemingly peaceful interactions in urban space do not exclude privately harboured racial, ethnic, religious and class prejudice, a feminist revision of encounters with diversity provides valuable insight into the structure of such metropolitan paradoxes, yielding new understandings of how racism, classism and sexism persist alongside ostensibly inclusive urban cultures.
... The study of Woramon Sinsuwan (2017) among Thai women in Berlin, for example, demonstrates that these women, despite having higher education and long-term professional experience, are perceived through the lens of a stereotype of Asian workers in Europe and offered jobs related to domestic care or beauty; in turn, they face the choice of unemployment or deskilling. Such racialised and gendered role expectations are mirrored in migrants' ideas on femininity of the self and others (Lisiak 2017(Lisiak , 2018. As home-space is the externalisation of the self (Jacobs and Malpas 2013), the idea of femininity shaped by migrants' socialisation correspond with their home-keeping practices. ...
Homes are spaces permeated by global flows. Homes of international migrants anchor objects and people with their norms, values and ideas that originate in different countries. From an auto-ethnographic perspective, I scrutinize selected objects in my own flat to ask what a transnational perspective can tell us about home spaces in the globalized condition. I argue that the power of nationalism is best visible when we study how migrants maintain connections to other spaces, times, and people in their homemaking. To demonstrate how transnationalism highlights the significance of gendered, classed and racialized nationalism for homemaking, I discuss three objects: a bookshelf, a tea pot, and my floor. Each of them helps me to reflect upon a different aspect - nationally shaped upbringing and heritage, raptures which become significant because of national closures, and racialised and gendered cultural norms and expectations towards home space and homemaking.
This chapter engages with seeing as a socio-cultural process and asks if it is possible to see beyond established categories. Nowicka illustrates how people struggle to order others into neatly delineated groups related to their gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Drawing on research from cognitive science and philosophy, the chapter investigates how we arrive from a messy sensory visual experience to discrete social categories. Thereby, the central interest of this chapter is the question how we could arrive at categories that better correspond to the intersectional experience of being in the world. Finally, the chapter points to the central role of attention and discusses the significance of the scientific gaze and the potential of artistic enquiry for a more intersectional form of seeing.
This article analyzes migrant narratives on masculinity through an intersectional perspective that is sensitive to spatial aspects. Drawing on research with migrants in Berlin and Munich in Germany, we unpack how (self-identified) Polish men negotiate their gender identity vis-à-vis other people in these cities whom they perceive as ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual others. We address how their social and ethnic backgrounds shape their narratives on foreign masculinities and femininities at the intersections of ethnicity and gender. In particular, we draw attention to how these negotiations are entangled with local discourses over the presence and visibility of various immigrant groups and cosmopolitan queer communities in the cities. The intersectional approach helps us to formulate how migrant masculine identities change in migration.
This article presents an inquiry into which tacit differences are relevant for how people make sense of encounters with others in urban settings, and how, if at all, they are translated into ethnic categories understood as ‘basic operators’ in everyday life. Drawing from our interviews with twenty Polish mothers living in Berlin and Munich, we argue that what our research participants distinguish as ‘typically Polish’ or ‘typically German’ is not necessarily connected to some ethnically specific ways of working or mothering, but, rather, significantly structured by locally specific forms of neoliberalism. By asking what kind of difference becomes understood as ethnic difference and how this process of demarcation occurs, this article adds to the strand of intersectional approaches that theorise the notion of difference, recognise heterogeneity of individual categories and render them suspect.
This article presents an inquiry into which tacit differences are relevant for how people make sense of encounters with others in urban settings, and how, if at all, they are translated into ethnic categories understood as ‘basic operators’ in everyday life. Drawing from our interviews with twenty Polish mothers living in Berlin and Munich, we argue that what our research participants distinguish as ‘typically Polish’ or ‘typically German’ is not necessarily connected to some ethnically specific ways of working or mothering, but, rather, significantly structured by locally specific forms of neoliberalism. By asking what kind of difference becomes understood as ethnic difference and how this process of demarcation occurs, this article adds to the strand of intersectional approaches that theorise the notion of difference, recognise heterogeneity of individual categories and render them suspect.
In this paper I argue that imbalances and silences persist in urban research. In particular, there is insufficient attention to anti-racist and feminist theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights. Intersectional and materialist urban analyses that take difference seriously are under-represented, while patriarchy, privilege, and positivism still linger. As a partial and aspirational remedy, I propose a “Feminist Partial Political Economy of Place” (FPEP) approach to urban research. FPEP is characterized by: (1) attention to gendered, raced, and intersectional power relations, including affinities and alliances; (2) reliance on partial, place-based, materialist research that attends to power in knowledge production; (3) emphasis on feminist concepts of relationality to examine connections among sites, scales, and subjects, and to emphasize “life” and possibility; and (4) the use of theoretical toolkits to observe, interpret and challenge material-discursive power relations. My own critique and research centers on North American cities, but FPEP approaches might help produce more robust, inclusive, and explanatory urban research in varied geographic contexts.
The linkage between race and migration, especially in the UK since the 1990s, has shifted from a focus on postcolonial migrants to focus on newer groups, while migration within the European Union has also altered the discussion of racism and migration. This critical review provides a framework for understanding how race is conceptualized (or ignored) in contemporary scholarship on migration. We identify three, partly overlapping nexi between migration and racialization: (1) ‘Changing Migrations – Continuities of Racism’; (2) ‘Complex Migrations – Differentialist Racialization’; (3) ‘Post-racial Migrations – Beyond Racism’. The article analyses what each of these nexi bring into focus as well as what they neglect. The concept of race–migration nexus aids a fuller understanding of how migration and contemporary racialization are co-constructed. Scholars need to consider the relationship between migration and race to better address pressing issues of racism against migrants and settled communities.
This paper investigates the relationship between perceived ethnic diversity at the neighbourhood level and acceptance of minority ethnic groups. We draw on a representative survey conducted in two dissimilar diversity contexts—Leeds, UK and Warsaw, Poland. The results of multilevel models demonstrate that in both cities, an increase in perceived ethnic diversity in the neighbourhood is related to an increase in ethnic prejudice of White-British and Polish people. However, the negative association of subjective perceptions of diversity with attitudes depends on the level of actual diversity in the neighbourhood. In Leeds, perceived diversity is more strongly negatively related with attitudes of residents living in more ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, while in Warsaw, in more homogenous neighbourhoods. We also find that in Leeds, the relationship between acceptance of minority ethnic groups and perceptions of diversity is moderated by the recent change in neighbourhood actual diversity (especially inflow of minorities of ‘other White’ and ‘Mixed’ ethnicity) and change in neighbourhood deprivation (increase in council housing). The findings testify to the importance of conducting comparative studies of the diversity of effects in various settings across Europe and the potential of using subjective measures of diversity in future research.
Researchers' performances in the field are gendered, classed, and ethnicized. We are watched and judged by our respondents based on how we look, what we say, and how we say it. Our appearance in the field may increase or decrease our chances of creating rapport, it may encourage respondents to talk to us or discourage them entirely from taking part in our research. Whereas we have no absolute control over all the factors determining how we present ourselves in the field, we do have some power over our dress. Although the act of getting dressed for fieldwork may appear inconspicuous and mundane, I argue in this article that its implications are most relevant for our thinking about how we design and perform fieldwork. Particularly the assumptions regarding our respondents' and our own class, gender, and ethnicity that we make before entering the field are worthy of careful consideration as they display our thought processes and, as such, are part of academic analysis.
URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1502146
This paper reflects on the understanding of contemporary forms of identity construction within the fields of ethnicity, migration and transnational population movements. It casts a critical eye on new forms of identity hailed by the related notions of diaspora, hybridity and cosmopolitanism. The paper also reflects on the concept of intersectionality which provides a more integrated analysis of identity formation by arguing for the inter-connections between social divisions, such as those of gender, ethnicity and class. The paper argues that the concept 'translocational positionality' (see Anthias) is a useful means of addressing some of the difficulties identified within these approaches. This concept addresses issues of identity in terms of locations which are not fixed but are context, meaning and time related and which therefore involve shifts and contradictions. It thereby provides an intersectional framing for the understanding of belonging. As an intersectional frame it moves away from the idea of given 'groups' or 'categories' of gender, ethnicity and class, which then intersect (a particular concern of some intersectionality frameworks), and instead pays much more attention to social locations and processes which are broader than those signalled by this.
The problem that the concept of ‘class’ describes is inequality. The transition from industrial to financial capitalism (neoliberalism) in Europe has effected ‘deepening inequalities of income, health and life chances within and between countries, on a scale not seen since before the second world War’ (Hall et al., 2014: 9). In this context, class is an essential point of orientation for sociology if it is to grasp the problem of inequality today. Tracing a route through Pierre Bourdieu's relational understanding of class, Beverley Skeggs’ understanding of class as struggles (over value), and Wendy Brown's argument that neoliberalism is characterized by the culturalization of political struggles, this article animates forms of class-analysis, with which we might better apprehend the forms of class exploitation that distinguish post-industrial societies. Taking a cue from Jacques Rancière, the central argument is that the sociology of class should be grounded not in the assumption and valorization of class identities but in an understanding of class as struggles against classification. In this way, sociology can contribute to the development of alternative social and political imaginaries to the biopolitics of disposability symptomatic of neoliberal governmentality.
From the wide range of problems facing the research on the social mobility of international migrants, I pick one issue which I think is of key importance. The research exclusively addresses the problem of deskilling – and, more broadly, of the integration of migrants – in the receiving context, taking skills as a fixed attribute of migrants. Drawing on studies on migrant subjectivity and on the research on migrant transnationalism, I argue that the context of origin of migrants for skill acquisition and validation during the migration process needs be considered as well. The way skills are defined, acquired and valorised in the country of origin has an influence on how migrants mobilise them in the receiving society and on how
they perceive their chances for negotiating strong positions on the labour market of the host country. The case of the recent migration of Polish labour to the UK, which I discuss in this article, is instructive because of the volume and constitution of the migration flow and the patterns of labour market integration of the workers, which I consider to be relevant to an expanding European Union in which new members gain access to the labour markets of the ‘old’ EU.
This editorial discusses the main strings of debates linking the discussions of insider research, gendered identities and concerns of methodological nationalism and groupism in migration studies. The insider/outsider dichotomy has been discussed in the academic literature for many years and in migration research this usually takes the form of ethnic/national categories. We suggest that researchers now need to think of abandoning these narrow and static views of their participants so as to challenge the dominance of the ethnic lens in migration studies. In this introductory article and in the articles that make up this thematic section, we aim to open a critical discussion of gender, identity, sameness, difference and ethnicity to explore the complex, shifting and multilayered dynamics that under-pin research encounters. Far from the assumed commonalities usually associated with "insider" research, we suggest instead that starting from a position of "uncertainty" challenges taken for granted groupist notions and enables researchers to be open to a wide array of possibilities in their encounters with participants.
Read the full paper at:
http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/2342
The challenge of diversity is much more than a change in terminology from categories like gender, ethnicity, age and class to the more encompassing and concealing term ‘diversity’. In contrast to gender and other categories of identity, which are often represented as sources of social inequality in organisations, ‘diversity’ does not so powerfully appeal to our sense of social justice. (Benschop, 2001, p. 1166)
This paper explores the tension between post-feminist discourses of freedom and the everyday negotiation of feminised identities in private and public spaces, for mothers residing in a marginalised locale in urban south Wales, UK. Applying the lens of gender to examine and foreground the place of ‘choice’ in mothers' lives, the paper works with visual and narrative accounts of the negotiation of acceptable motherhood. The paper argues that despite a pervasive rhetoric of agency and equality, the practice and performance of motherhood continues to operate within asymmetrical gendered and classed spaces inside the confines of respectable femininity. Challenging the concept of new motherhood, where women are led to believe that they can maintain the status of breadwinner, domestic goddess and primary care giver, the paper theorises agency as operating within the impossibility of unachievable ideals.
This paper proposes the need to move beyond current integration and diversity discourses (and their practices). It argues that whilst purportedly aiming to attack social divisions, on the one hand, these are underpinned by binary and essentialized constructions of these very divisions, on the other. They thereby reinforce notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In order to retain their more progressive concerns with heterogeneity and inclusion, the paper brings into focus an intersectional approach that considers the complex and irreducible nature of belonging and social hierarchy. The paper also considers the potential of notions of solidarity and interculturalism in dealing with some of the social issues involved.
This article analyzes the new social type of the “yummy mummy” in British culture, which both marks a substantial cultural shift—given that the Western Christian tradition has typically positioned mothers as asexual—and is simultaneously produced by increasing economic inequalities (which are particularly marked in relation to childcare). Drawing from a range of sources, particularly celebrity guidebooks and “hen lit” novels, this article argues that the yummy mummy functions to elide such social contexts and espouses a girlish, high-consuming maternal ideal as a site of hyperindividualized psychological “maturity.” “Successful” maternal femininity is articulated by rejecting “environmentally conscious” behavior and by rendering what are presented as excessive eco-delusions both abject and transparent. This tendency is indicative of the conservative nature of the phenomenon, which is forced to disavow wider structures of social, political, and ecological dependency in order for its conservative fantasy of autonomous, individualizing retreatism to be maintained.
In the last three years a new vocabulary of social class has emerged in Britain. The word “chav,” alongside its various synonyms and regional variations, has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor. This article explores the emergence of the grotesque and comic figure of the chav within a range of contemporary British media focusing on the role played by disgust reactions in the generation and circulation of the chav figure through popular media. Concentrating on the figure of the female chav, and the vilification of young white working-class mothers, this article argues that the “chav mum” is produced through disgust reactions as an intensely affective figure that embodies historically familiar and contemporary anxieties about female sexuality, reproduction, fertility, and “racial mixing.”
Segregation along lines of race/ethnicity and class has created multi-ethnic and rather class-homogeneous neighbourhoods in various European cities, commonly labelled as ‘disadvantaged’. Such neighbourhoods are often seen as ‘lacking’ community, as local networks are crucial for belonging and mixed neighbourhoods are too diverse to provide homogeneous identifications. However, in contrast to the understandings of the sociology of community, people might still experience ‘belonging’, yet in different ways. This article argues that we have to focus on the under-researched ‘time in-between’ (Byrne, 1978), the absent ties that Granovetter (1973) pointed to, to understand belonging, while moving away from a conception of the anonymous city and from the urban village. This article explores how absent ties affect belonging by empirically sustaining the notion of public familiarity: both recognizing and being recognized in local spaces. Using regression models on survey data from two mixed neighbourhoods in Berlin, Germany, we analyse the importance of neighbourhood use for public familiarity as well as how it relates to residents' comfort zone: people's feeling of belonging and their sense that others would intervene on their behalf. Our findings indicate that research on neighbourhoods could benefit greatly from a careful consideration of the ‘time in-between’.
Ob jemand als zugehörig oder als »nicht von hier« gilt, wird im Kontext von Migration oft an Körperlichem festgemacht. Doch wie hängen Fragen nach dem Körper und nach Migration als Erfahrung und Zuschreibung zusammen? Die empirisch-qualitative Studie geht dem Verhältnis von Körper und Sozialität, von körperlichem Empfinden und Zuschreibungserfahrungen im Zusammenhang mit Migration nach. Dabei kommen junge Frauen in biografischen Interviews zu Wort und porträtieren sich in Fotografien. Durch die Analyse der Körperinszenierungen in Text und Bild wird deutlich, dass Körperlichkeit im Kontext von Migration als ein in sich flexibler Möglichkeitsraum zu verstehen ist.
Frankenberg explores the unique intersection of race and sex as she examines the way that white women relate to racism. She writes from the assumption that whiteness is socially constructed rather than naturally pre-existing. She theorizes "from experience" to offer a unique perspective that retains the strength of a theoretical foundation as well as the relatability of personal narratives. She interviews thirty white women to get their perspectives on various racial topics and gain a critical standpoint for thinking about individual and social forces that construct and maintain whiteness in contemporary society. She begins with the question, "What is white women's relationship to racism?" The women discuss various aspects of interracial courtship, the role of power in acknowledging racial differences, and the function of language in facing and overcoming the negative effects of this difference.
This article addresses the many complexities of migrant mothering by examining the unique ways in which it is performed, negotiated and made sense of by migrant mothers themselves. Drawing on interviews conducted with recent Polish migrant women who mother small children in British cities, I study how mothering is inscribed with value and how kinwork is done locally, among ‘people like us’ (Stack, 1974). I discuss how migrant mothers position themselves vis-à-vis the other mothers they encounter in their neighbourhoods, and how these positionings are gendered, classed and ethnicised. I propose that practising and displaying intensive mothering may serve as a form of cultural capital for migrant mothers, a means of positioning themselves favourably in a new neighbourhood or school. For recent migrants, intensive mothering may thus work to ‘elevate’ them beyond the migrant experience.
This article has been included in Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal Recent Influential Papers collection. Check it out free until December 31st: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/ethnic-and-racial-studies-most-influential-papers-2020/
Thinking of racism through the lens of its geographies and temporality – a transnational lens, as I understand it – is productive for our understanding of the current process of social integration of immigrants in European cities. I argue that an interactive model of racism can help us understand the spread (and revival) of racism in Europe, and develop a new take on intersections of racism and immigration. Using the example of the Polish “post-enlargement” immigration to England, I scrutinize how racism is altered through social networks spanning localities within and across national borders. I demonstrate how the research participants incorporate, reproduce, and transform racism present in the British multicultural public space into a cultural repertoire (habitus) they internalized before migration. I argue that racism is a transnational outcome of ongoing negotiations between past and current experiences, and between parties in two or more geographical locations.
Congratulations to Dr. McRobbie! This book has been named to the list of books for the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA).These essays show Angela McRobbie reflecting on a range of issues which have political consequence for women, particularly young women, in a context where it is frequently assumed that progress has been made in the last 30 years, and that with gender issues now 'mainstreamed' in cultural and social life, the moment of feminism per se is now passed. McRobbie trenchantly argues that it is precisely on these grounds that invidious forms of gender -re-stabilisation are able to be re-established. Consumer culture, she argues, encroaches on the terrain of so called female freedom, appears supportive of female success only to tie women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies. These nine essays span a wide range of topics, including - the UK government's 'new sexual contract' to young women, - popular TV makeover programmes, - feminist theories of backlash and the 'undoing' of sexual politics, - feminism in a global frame- the 'illegible rage' underlying contemporary femininities.
‘Muslim’ migrants (whether as an ascribed or self-chosen identity) and even Muslim citizens are currently constructed as a key figure of threatening Otherness to European values (cf. Bourne, 2007). Whether through explicit policies or through implicit symbolic representations, migrants are required to position themselves vis-à-vis shared values in order to prove they can be legitimate members of the society they live in. Increasingly, gender equality and sexual liberalism stand in as measures for migrants’ ability to positively identify with the wider freedoms that ‘European values’ are associated with (cf. Haritaworn et al., 2008).
This contribution investigates the social distance of immigrants from Poland in four Western European cities – London, Birmingham, Berlin and Munich – sparticularly Polish immigrants’ distance towards members of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities in their various social roles. Presenting unique data from the first wave of a longitudinal qualitative study, we first discuss the differential levels of social distance that Polish immigrants place between themselves and members of minority groups in each city. We find that respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics impact their social distance, but their education and occupation may have less of an effect than their place of origin in Poland or current place of residence and work. Moreover, these factors work differentially across the four cities. After analysing social distance with respect to three dimensions of difference – ethnicity, religion and sexuality – we find several different social-distancing mechanisms. Ultimately, we argue that social science needs to consider regional and local contexts in which social attitudes towards minorities are acquired and exercised. Similarly, we need to reflect on the group’s presumed homogeneity and on the unifying visions of the ‘host society’ as a site of migrants’ incorporation.
Although significant scholarly attention has been devoted to the study of mosque conflicts in Europe, up until now most of it has focussed on Western European countries. This has left a significant gap to be filled in the study of mosque tensions in Central and Eastern Europe, where scholarship is scant yet where tensions over constructions of mosques are not less intensive than in the West. Drawing on two recent case studies of mosque constructions in Poland, we argue that a significant shift has taken place in the ways that mosques are perceived, unveiling unprecedented opposition towards their construction. From being largely unproblematic before the Second World War and during the Communist era, mosques have become subjects of fierce public debate. We draw parallels to how anti-mosque arguments raised in Poland fit into a larger European meta-narrative on mosques and Muslims, yet our aim is to situate the paper historically to argue that Polish mosque conflicts must be contextualised within Poland’s unique historical encounter with Islam in order to more accurately make sense of its creeping Islamophobia.
The focus of this chapter is language, qualifications and skills across European countries and the strategies that migrant women use to overcome policy gaps, insufficiencies and barriers as well as blocked social mobility. The chapter investigates the role played by qualifications and language competencies as a resource for “integration”, both in the context of control-oriented migration policies and of labour market integration policies. A comparative analysis addresses policies for language acquisition in the framework of broader integration and control policies. It critically evaluates, using a gender-sensitive perspective, the infrastructures for the recognition of certificates and for language acquisition in European societies. It also analyses the strategies of new female migrants for overcoming the limitations set by socio-economic contexts and specific policies across national contexts in particular in relation to reskilling opportunities. This is also examined against the background of welfare systems, civil society structures and migration policy traditions. Examples include employing creative strategies of language self-learning, acquiring skills in terms of the self-professionalisation of care work, actively acquiring new competencies and creating paths to paid work. The role played by other actors, such as employers, co-ethnics and NGOs, in helping migrant women to access learning structures, vocational training, reskilling and language courses are also explored.
What is whiteness? Why is it worth using as a tool in the social sciences? Making sociological sense of the idea of whiteness, this book skilfully argues how this concept can help us understand contemporary societies. If one of sociology's objectives is to make the familiar unfamiliar in order to gain heightened understanding, then whiteness offers a perfect opportunity to do so. Leaning firstly on the North American corpus, this key book critically engages with writings on the formation of white identities in Britain, Ireland and the Americas, using multidisciplinary sources. Empirical work done in the UK, including the author's own, is developed in order to suggest how whiteness functions in Britain. Bringing an emphasis on empirical work to a heavily theorized area, this important text synthesizes and reviews existing work, incorporates multidisciplinary sources of interest to those outside the sociology sphere, and features concise chapters which will engage undergraduates. Garner deftly argues that whiteness is a multifaceted, contingent and fluid identity, and that it must be incorporated into any contemporary understandings of racism as a system of power relationships in both its local and global forms.
This paper examines the reasons for the invisibility of skilled female migrants in studies of skilled migration in Europe. The choice of research agendas has played a major part in rendering women invisible. The emphasis has generally been on transnational corporations, which, especially in their higher ranks, remain resolutely male- dominated. The presence of migrants in welfare sectors (i.e. education, health and social services), which are strongly feminised, has been ignored. Feminist research has also tended to obscure the role of skilled migrants in its emphasis on the unskilled. Theoretical and methodological developments in studies of migration have also made few inroads into our understanding of skilled migration.
This timely and innovative book analyses the lives of new female migrants in the EU with a focus on the labour market, domestic work, care work and prostitution in particular. It provides a comparative analysis embracing eleven European countries from Northern (UK, Germany, Sweden, France), Southern (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus) and Eastern Europe (Poland, Slovenia), i.e. old and new immigration countries as well as old and new market economies. It maps labour market trends, welfare policies, migration laws, patterns of employment, and the working and social conditions of female migrants in different sectors of the labour market, formal and informal. It is particularly concerned with the strategies women use to counter the disadvantages they face. It analyses the ways in which gender hierarchies are intertwined with other social relations of power, providing a gendered and intersectional perspective, drawing on the biographies of migrant women. The book highlights policy relevant issues and tries to uncover some of the contradictory assumptions relating to integration which it treats as a highly normative and problematic concept. It reframes integration in terms of greater equalisation and democratisation (entailed in the parameters of access, participation and belonging), pointing to its transnational and intersectional dimensions.
Being a ‘stranger’ has become increasingly difficult on the European continent during the latest decades. Populist racism and anti-immigration attitudes have made life difficult, and Denmark has taken the position as one of the iconic cases of this development. But how is that reflected in the cities? Does the character of the city as ‘a world of strangers’ open up special possibilities of coexistence? These are the questions addressed in this paper using material from an interpretative analysis conducted among Copenhagen citizens of Pakistani origin. The analysis aims to construe an affective mapping of life as an ethnic minority in the city. It revolves around three issues. First, it focuses on the narrators’ experiences of exclusions and blockages in everyday life. This is followed by a focus on urban belonging emphasizing its differential character. Finally, the ambiguity of experiences is discussed, including the paradox that the experiences of estrangement apparently have only marginal influence on the possibility of belonging. The narrators simultaneously express strong emotions around exclusions and construe different creative ways of belonging to the city.
Purpose
– A negative framing of immigrants to stir populist sentiment is a widespread tactic repeatedly deployed by the British press. Following the accession of ten new and predominantly Eastern European member‐states to the European Union in 2004, this gambit was again utilised to provocatively portray migrant workers newly arriving in the United Kingdom as an external economic threat. The aim of this paper was to uncover the recurrent ways in which Polish migrants were emotively framed by the top daily British newspapers during this period of EU enlargement.
Design/methodology/approach
– A bespoke collection of newspaper articles was assembled and examined using a corpus‐based discourse analysis. The analysis was subsequently triangulated with relevant responses to a series of public opinion surveys.
Findings
– Results show that the British press conformed to classic media representations of migrants when referring to Poles in particular, by depicting them as an external economic threat “flooding” the country; in addition a novel stereotype of the “Polish plumber” was used to present them arriving to take the jobs of native manual labourers.
Originality/value
– The study adds to the understanding of media attitudes towards new migrants in the UK, and demonstrates the utility of triangulated corpus‐based discourse analysis for those who seek to highlight systematic characterisations of migrants in the popular press.
Women’s equality claims have occupied the forefront of the European debate on face-veil bans; most claims have been denounced as mere manipulation for anti-Islamic and/or anti-immigrant political agendas, and the dilemma between anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles has been argued to be false. This article examines how opportunistic manipulation of gender equality claims and the ‘ethnicisation’ of sexism have been assessed and confronted in the scholarly debate opposing the bans, as well as the impact that this debate has had on women’s equality claims and the intersectionality issue. I argue that the women’s oppression argument has not been fully considered, because it would have disrupted the anti-racist struggle due to unresolved problems with understanding intersectionality.
This article analyzes the construction in the UK media of the ‘stay-at-home mother’, a maternal figure who received increasing visibility during the recession and its aftermath. Based on a content analysis of UK national newspaper coverage of stay-at-home mothers (2008-2013), this article argues that the stay-at-home mother emerges from its press coverage as a neoliberal postfeminist subject. On the one hand, the coverage complicates claims about antifeminist backlash and women’s harking back to passive femininity. On the other hand, it fails significantly to undermine maternal femininity’s entanglement with neoliberalism, and reinforces the process described by McRobbie as ‘disarticulation’, by separating between middle-class mothers and working-class mothers.
The London Borough of Hackney is one of the most diverse places in the United Kingdom. It is characterized not only by a multiplicity of ethnic minorities but also by differentiations in terms of migration histories, religions and educational and economic backgrounds, both among long-term residents and newcomers. This article attempts to describe how people negotiate social interactions in such a 'super-diverse' context. It develops the notion of 'commonplace diversity', referring to ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity being experienced as a normal part of social life by local residents. This commonplace diversity has resulted in people acting with 'civility towards diversity'. While in public space people do not change their behaviour according to other people's backgrounds, in semi-public spaces, such as associations and local institutions, here conceptualized as 'parochial space', people's different backgrounds are acknowledged and sometimes talked about. The article discusses how people negotiate their differences in these two different kinds of spaces. It shows how civility towards diversity is used as a strategy to both engage with difference as well as avoid deeper contact. Civility thus facilitates the negotiation of both positive relations and possible tensions.
This essay interrogates the emergence of a new moment in the unfolding of contemporary neoliberal hegemony which sees the political potential in creating strong connections with liberal feminism, updating this while also retaining some of its most salient features dating back to the mid to late 1970s. At the same time this process, which can be traced through the very contemporary entanglements of political culture, visual media and new social media, finds concretisation through the figure of the middle-class mother who is slim and youthful in appearance. This persona, whether in full time work or a 'stay home Mum' is accredited a more substantial professional status than was the case in the era of the 'housewife'. With feminism 'taken into account' she is considered an equal partner in marriage and thus charged with making the right choices and decisions for her family needs. In this neoliberal version of past notions of 'maternal citizenship' a number of socio-political processes can be seen at work, she is compared favourably for her well-planned and healthy life in comparison to her less advantaged, low income, single parent counterparts. Her lifestyle and childcare choices mark a strong departure, indeed an entirely different trajectory to previous generations of mothers, who across the boundaries of class and ethnicity, benefited from a feminist post-war welfare ethos which regarded nursery provision for pre-school children, toddlers and indeed babies as a social good. And finally her presence and visibility in a number of campaigning and online organisations suggests a stronger class divide than was the case in the past and with this the eclipsing of the egalitarian principles of social democracy. The essay reflects on the film Revolutionary Road (2009) and the recent book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as conduits for this new 'maternalfeminine'.
Inspired by and responding to Avtar Brah's 'The Scent of Memory', this piece attempts to reinscribe race into an auto-ethnographic narrative where previously whiteness was unmarked. It explores the dynamics of gender, race and class through the author's personal history as a white English woman and class migrant, and through discussion of the broader political and historical context of that trajectory. The discussion includes analysis of the impact of British Conservative politician Enoch Powell's infamous 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968 on the author's white English working-class culture of origin in Wolverhampton, where Powell was a Member of Parliament. The article considers the speech's continuing ramifications in the twenty-first century and in more middle-class contexts, as evidenced by the recent evocation of the speech by historian David Starkey in discussion of the 'riots' of August 2011 in British cities. The personal history is reconstructed through a series of memory scenes that trace and retrace the author's experience and understanding of race and its intersections with class and gender; this is attempted in full cognisance of the constructed nature of memory, and of the performance of identity that autobiography entails. The piece draws on the work of the class migrant white French writer Annie Ernaux, with whom the author has been in dialogue since 1997.