Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth
... targeting im/migrant youth in particular who are seen as the source of 'national troubles' (Ruck et al., 2008, p. 16). 2 In the context of such moral panics, it is not unusual for nations to devise technologies of surveillance-racialising mechanisms that disproportionately direct their attention to the moves of im/migrant youth, positioning them as either 'delinquent citizens' (Ramos-Zayas, 2004) or, more subtly, as youth requiring civilising, even if of the affirmative kind (see Kwon, 2013;Jaffe-Walter, 2016). The present paper considers what the epistemological standpoints of migrant youth-whose bodies must daily endure racialising public surveillance and bear the burden of the collective worries about nations' futurescan teach us about knowledge-making and about opportunities therein for resistance and transformation. ...
... Centring Youth and the Human Too often, contemporary moral, political and social concerns are carried in the biographies of young people. State regimes of power perpetuate processes of racialisation that target the bodies of migrant youth of colour, positioning them as 'others' who require intervention (Abu El-Haj, 2015;Jaffe-Walter, 2016;Ríos-Rojas, 2011). Feminists of colour have long attuned us to the knowledge that arises from the social, cultural, structural locations or 'standpoints' of marginalised communities (Collins, 1986;Dotson, 2011;Hooks, 1989;Hurtado, 1989;Love, 2019;Lugones, 2020). ...
... Ríos-Rojas' study in Spain is an ethnographic exploration of the manner in which im/migrant youth from Latin America and Morocco navigated racialised hierarchies of belonging and conditional forms of citizenship in their everyday schooling experiences and beyond (see Ríos-Rojas, 2011;. Jaffe-Walter's ethnographic study in Denmark traces how nationalist discourses and policies were enacted in the everyday practices of a Danish folkeskole and how they informed Muslim students' identities and school experiences (see Jaffe-Walter, 2013, 2016, 2017. Both researchers conducted participation observation three to five days a week over the course of a year and both returned to their respective sites for follow-up data collection. ...
... Paedagogerne får ikke ansporet Eva til at samarbejde med dem om at drage omsorg for Stephanie, ligesom Eva ikke klaeder paedagogerne på til deres arbejde med at drage omsorg for Stephanie i vuggestuen. Paedagogerne forsøger at komme taet på for hermed at udøve deres omsorgsfulde magt (Jaffe-Walter, 2016;Bregnbaek, 2022), og når det ikke lykkes, må de gribe til andre måder at gøre det opsporende arbejde på mere skjulte måder. Det medfører at paedagogerne fortsaetter med systematiske observationer og nedskrivning af situationer, de opfatter som bekymringsvaekkende. ...
... I en analyse af magt (jf. Bregnbaek, 2022;Jaffe-Walter, 2016) kan paedagogernes samarbejde med Darina og Marek forstås som statens indgriben i familielivet på en måde, der slører magten, idet begge parter synes at enes om det gode i paedagogernes intervention, ligesom magten tydeliggøres i mødet med Eva og Rheino, når de frasiger, sig paedagogernes råd og hjaelp og dermed må leve med paedagogernes bekymrende blikke. Som vi videre vil pege på, åbner denne analyse for perspektiver på samarbejde som andet og mere end former for magtudøvelse. ...
Denne artikel handler om pædagogers samarbejde med familier i vanskeligheder og viser, hvordan samarbejdet er forankret i en social praksis, der vanskeliggør pæda-gogers bestræbelser på at drage omsorg og samtidig være tidlig opsporende af mulige problemstillinger i børn og forældres liv. Gennem artiklen undersøger vi, hvordan samarbejdet mellem pædagoger og forældre både er sammenhængende med det pæ-dagogiske arbejdes betingelser såvel som betingelserne for familiernes livsførelse. Fælles for artiklens to empiriske eksempler er, at deres familielivsførelse er i vanske-ligheder. Vanskelighederne i familiernes hverdagsliv mødes imidlertid meget forskel-ligt af pædagogerne, hvilket ser ud til at være sammenhængende med, hvordan foræl-drene forstås som relevante samarbejdspartnere, og hvordan de formår at træde ind i samarbejdets sociale relation, hvor pædagoger agerer ’hjælpere’ for de ’værdigt trængende’ forældre (Bader, 1993). Artiklen bidrager med et perspektiv på, hvordan forældresamarbejdet handler om betingelser for at forbinde modsatrettede perspekti-ver og opgaver, så vanskeligheder i familiers hverdagsliv ikke bliver til individualise-rede problemstillinger. Nøgleord:Omsorg, tidlig opsporing, udsathed, forældresamarbejde, livsførelse
... She described a discussion she had with a white friend in her secondary school class a few years prior to our interview. The discussion was about Aisha declining to participate in the graduation festivities because of the alcohol consumption that usually dominates these celebrations: Aisha stressed her Danishness in this argument with her friend, and thus objected to the invalid representation of her as an immigrant, i.e. a 'guest' that needed to conform to the Danish way of doing things (Hervik, 2004;Jaffe-Walter, 2016). She argued against cultural conformity as a way of determining Danishness and instead emphasised her own sense of national belonging by understating her family's migration history and instead highlighting her entitlement to being Danish. ...
... Although this 'us versus them' dichotomy is particularly promulgated by right-wing political parties, the pervasiveness of this political representation has become ubiquitous in everyday life where people, such as Aisha's classmate, experience frustration with Muslims' alleged lack of conformity (Gullestad, 2004;Jaffe-Walter, 2016). Speaking against this, Aisha explained how the unproblematic usage of 'new Danes' to describe ethnic minorities perpetuated her 'foreignness' even three generations after her family's settlement in Denmark. ...
... In most multi-ethnic schools in Denmark, teachers express ideals of including minority children and accommodating cultural and religious diversity (Jensen 2013, Gilliam 2019, Jaffe-Walter 2016. ...
... Former 'South Asian', 'North African' or 'Turkish' boys have been recast as 'Muslim' troublemakers and potential terrorists who must be monitored and taught democratic values (Shain 2011, Gilliam 2015, Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 2017. Meanwhile, girls with Muslim backgrounds are met with more positive but still stigmatising concern, as teachers respond to troubling cases of so-called honour killings and forced marriages with liberalizing and assimilatory practices directed especially towards veil-wearing girls (Zine 2001, Keaton 2006, Jaffe-Walter 2016. While this tendency has been described in schools across Europe, showing that 'Muslimness' is partially constructed in schools, research demonstrates that the way these schools deal with religion and the conditions for Muslim students' inclusion and citizenship vary depending on national histories of migration, secularism, education and nation-building (Mannitz 2004, Gilliam 2019. ...
The ethnic boundary between majority Danes and Muslim minorities has become increasingly impermeable in recent decades, restricting Muslim minorities to conditional inclusion, adapting to the majority’s conditions of good citizenship. This article looks at the ‘conditions of inclusion’ for Muslim pupils in multi-ethnic schools, focusing on what pupils express as an ideal of being a ‘relaxed Muslim’. This condition of ‘relaxed’ religiosity reflects the dominant discourse on integration in Denmark with its anxiety about Islamism and demand that Muslims adjust to the
moderate secularism that typifies Danish society. Yet it is argued, that it also points to a more general condition of being a good minority citizen in the Danish welfare society and its institutions,
as well as in other similar societies, linked to ensuring the smooth running of everyday practices, ideas about civilised interaction, and maintaining the cultural dominance of the majority, and thus to a majority-defined harmony.
... They are unsurprisingly positioned at a low status within U.S. society at large, and schools operate in ways that enforce this social stratification. It has been well documented that these students contend with deficit mindsets, prejudice, xenophobia, and outright hostility in schools from students, staff, and educators alike (see, for example, Adair & Colegrove, 2021;Arzubiaga et al., 2009;Bach, 2020;Dávila & Linares, 2020;Doucet, 2017;Jaffe-Walter, 2016;Olsen, 2008;Rodriguez et al., 2020). Interestingly, interviews revealed that ESOL teachers, themselves, are also positioned at a low status. ...
This chapter reports on findings from an ethnographic study investigating the perceptions held by secondary teachers of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) of the cross-cultural relationships they form with their students. Framed by the field of care ethics, the author outlines what these teachers reveal about how to enact care in ways that are appreciated and recognized as caring by those from different cultural backgrounds. The experience of parallel status positioning, in which both multilingual students and their ESOL teachers occupy positions of low status within the social sphere and the instructional sphere, respectively, creates a space in which these teachers identify with and act in solidarity with their students. In their relationships with students, ESOL teachers engage dispositions of openness to difference and empathy and enact care in a number of culturally affirming ways. Taken together, these attitudes and actions illuminate a way to care across difference.
... Foraeldreforløbet kan ses som et led i en udvikling, hvor staten i stigende grad raekker ind i familien med institutionelle agendaer, som er målrettet foraeldre i en saerlig kategoriuanset den enkelte families situation. Denne udvikling er beskrevet i både dansk og inter national litteratur (fx Bregnbaek, 2017;Faircloth & Murray, 2015;JaffeWalter, 2016;Juhl et al., 2023;Kryger, 2015). Forskere har for eksempel peget på, at krav fra daginstitutioner i stigende grad raekker ind i og saetter betingelser for foraeldres organisering af familiens hverdagsliv (Kousholt, 2017;Westerling & Juhl, 2019). ...
Artiklen handler om interventionen ’obligatorisk læringstilbud’. Formålet med artiklen er dels at undersøge de politiske problemforståelser, der ligger til grund for interventionen, dels at undersøge hvordan interventionen får betydning i forældres hverdagsliv. Artiklen er baseret på empirisk materiale i form af kvalitative interviews med to forældrepar og to pædagoger samt observationer fra tre eftermiddage i det forældreforløb, der er en del af interventionen. I artiklen inddrages desuden danske policytekster om ’obligatorisk læringstilbud’. Artiklen viser, hvordan interventionen, som har til formål at forebygge parallelsamfund og øge deltagelse i samfundet, i praksis betyder, at de involverede forældre får sværere ved at bevare deres tilknytning til uddannelse og arbejdsmarked. English abstract Mandatory Learning Program – Problem Representations and Parents’ Perspectives The article deals with the intervention “mandatory learning program.” The purpose is partly to examine the political understandings of the issues underlying the intervention and partly to investigate how the intervention affects parents’ everyday lives. The article is based on empirical material in the form of qualitative interviews with two sets of parents and two pedagogues, as well as observations from three sessions in the parental program that is part of the intervention. The article demonstrates how parents involved in the intervention find it more challenging to maintain their connection to education and the job market.
... Recognizing that the formation of national identities takes place not only through the curriculum but also through everyday practices and rituals which render the link between youth and the nation effectively "invisible" through its very familiarity (Billig 1995), anthropological work has explored youth reactions to-and creative engagements with-the state-sponsored identities in which their lives are embedded. In recent decades, scholars worldwide have also looked at the intersection of nationalism and ethnicity with gender, religious, or racial identities (e.g., Blum 2011;Hemment 2015;Jaffe-Walter 2016;Suleymanova 2020). ...
This chapter explores the role of education processes in the construction of youth collective identities in 21st-century mainland China. Drawing on the results of anthropological work and on data from two field studies among Han (Chinese) high school students conducted over the past decade or so, the discussion highlights the key role of ethnographic research in uncovering contemporary tensions within China's educational agendas, and the conflicting forces shaping youth nationalism and global outlook today. In particular, the chapter underscores the intersection between youth social positioning and perceived life chances, their attitudes toward official narratives of the 'nation', and their readiness to align themselves with the national collectivity.
... Mignolo (2011) argues that individuals in very different parts of the world can undergo similar circumstances of turmoil and collective memory, as consequences of colonialism, or the "colonial wound". Scholars have demonstrated that immigrant youth have untapped strengths obtained through these border-crossing experiences that allow them to hold critical understandings of society around them (Dyrness & Abu El-Haj, 2020;Dyrness & Sepúlveda, 2020;Jaffe-Walter, 2016;Ríos-Rojas, 2011). These forms of knowledge, stemming from shared struggles of marginalization, can lead to "epistemologies of the South" (de Sousa Santos, 2018) or border gnosis (Dyrness & Sepúlveda, 2020). ...
This critical ethnographic study explores a participatory action research group consisting of Latin American immigrant mothers seeking to involve their community in school decision‐making. Drawing from pedagogies of acompañamiento, I describe how the mothers responded to decision‐making challenges and leveraged reflections on their struggles to co‐create knowledge and belonging. I demonstrate how their collective learning highlights transformation outside of formal policy channels, pushing us to consider alternative ways of making social change.
... While adult refugees attend the obligatory introduction program to learn Norwegian in institutions for adults run by municipalities, the ECEC centers play a similar role, particularly the reception ECEC centers that are run exclusively for refugee children. The present study shows that that the ECEC professionals perceive that refugees are expected to acquire competence in Norwegian language for them to be seen as integrated in the wider Norwegian society (Gilliam, 2017;Goodman, 2019;Jaffe-Walter, 2016). ...
This article explores the tensions that arise in the integration process of refugee children in Norwegian ECEC centres. For many refugee children, ECEC centres form the first public institution where they learn about the norms and values outside of their homes. Using institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry, data was gathered using semi-structured interviews with ECEC professionals, focusing on how they interact with refugee children and how they do everyday integration work. The article adopts the concept of the "civilizing process" by Norbert Elias as the overarching analytical concept. The findings reveal that integration of refugee children involves tensions in negotiating language, civilising children into Norwegian ideals of childhood, and civilising parents into the Norwegian cultural ideal of parenting.
... Analysen har vist hvordan affektive investeringer og spaendinger kontinuerligt har udviklet sig i forsknings-og uddannelsespraksisser om racisme og antiracisme. Samtidig viser forskning fortsat hvordan racialiseringsprocesser spiller en central rolle i dansk skolesammenhaeng (Gilliam, 2006;Jaffe-Walter, 2016;Lagermann, 2015aLagermann, , 2015bVertelyté, 2019;Staunaes & Vertelyté, 2023), og hvordan antiracistisk uddannelse vinder større indpas i nordisk sammenhaeng generelt. Endvidere diskuterer nordiske forskere antiracistisk uddannelse bredt set; fra den dekoloniale kritik af uddannelse (Eriksen & Svendsen, 2020) til antiracistisk undervisning på videregående uddannelser (Alemanji & Seikkula, 2017) og udviklingen af antiracistiske workshops og digitale teknologier for antiracisme (Alemanji & Mafi, 2018), ligesom nye danske vaerker er på vej om farveblinde vinkler og antiracistiske paedagogikker (Khawaja & Lagermann, 2023). ...
Forskere, undervisere og pædagoger har længe arbejdet med at udvikle og sætte begreb på antiracistisk pædagogik. Artiklen kortlægger skiftende forståelser af race og racisme i en dansk uddannelsessammenhæng gennem analyse af vidensproduktion om antiracistisk undervisning fra 1980erne og til i dag. Artiklen fokuserer på affektive spændinger og investeringer i antiracistisk pædagogisk praksis og tænkning. Vi viser, hvordan den antiracistiske diskurs som ’tolerancearbejde’, der dominerede 1980er og 1990erne, udviklede en pædagogisk strategi om og som ’at skabe en god og positiv stemning’, og hvordan følelser af ubehag, forlegenhed og ængstelse ved at tale om race blev en del af antiracistisk forskning og praksis fra 00erne og frem. Gennem analyse af hvordan forskellige affektive registre og intensiteter historisk set væver sig ind i antiracistiske pædagogikker i Danmark, viser vi hvordan affekt er uløseligt forbundet med (uddannelses)politik.
... Heidi Safia Mirza (2009) also examines this in her studies on higher education in the UK, where the inherent historical, structural and institutionalised exclusion of ethnic and racialised minority subjects is analysed in detail, showing how Black students and members of faculty feel out of place in white academic structures (also see Johnson & Joseph-Salisbury, 2018). This tendency is also seen in studies in Danish educational contexts, where the overarching and seemingly well-intentioned principle of equality, in practice, works as an ideal of homogeneity, resulting in a colourblind approach (Jaffe-Walter, 2016;Lagermann, 2013). In Kirsten Hvenegaard-Lassen and Dorthe Staunaes's (2021) study, the question of race and diversity is analysed through the idiom of the elephant in the room, showing how racialisation is a powerful but silenced backdrop in Danish higher education. ...
... ly perform Dutch cultural values and norms (Schinkel, 2008;Duyvendak et al., 2016). For "non-Western" and/or Muslim immigrants, such values and norms include not wearing a headscarf, participating in society (economically), and being independent in terms of transportation (not riding in a car but cycling to work or taking the children to school) (Kaya, 2009;Jaffe-Walter, 2016). These gendered assimilative practices foreground Eurocentric Christian and atheist ideals, and they push women in different ways than male immigrants to demonstrate that they are not living under the foot of either their partners or their religion, both of which are thought to hold them back from true independence (Eijberts & Ghorashi, 2017). ...
... Scholars have provided ample critiques of inclusion initiatives in neoliberal settings: the use of disability representation as a marker of feel-good and depoliticized diversity (Friedner 2015); the reliance on tokenism and further neglect of disabled people whose productivity cannot be maintained easily with the help of available prosthetic technologies (Mitchell and Snyder 2015); and the disregard for the cost of domestic inclusionism that relies on outsourced geopolitical warfare and exploitative workfare (Puar 2017). Following anthropologists and others who have critiqued institutional inclusion (Ahmed 2012;Jaffe-Walter 2016;Keating and Mirus 2003), I scrutinize the often undertheorized intercorporeal aspects of disability-inclusion initiatives, offering an account of how disability exclusion transcends the power of political decisions and laws. In so doing, I explore the planes of life that are unreachable by public policies (Ghosh 2018;Spade 2015) and that extend beyond the familiar strategies of liberal disability-rights activism, identity politics, and the fight for better laws (see also Puar 2017). ...
In this article, I analyze how inklyuziya activists and practitioners in Russia create contexts for “real inklyuziya” (nastoyashchaya inklyuziya, emic term). They do so by orchestrating engagements based on interactive corporeality, instead of circulating information about disability inclusion or mandating inclusivity at the organizational level. I conceptualize their chosen inklyuziya technology as intercorporeal togetherness—corporeally constituted responsiveness and reciprocity across the dis/ability divide. I argue that disability exclusion, with ableism as its driver, is adopted corporeally in bodyminds. Bodyminds rarely, on their own, reorient toward disability inclusion, even when encouraging laws and protections are put in place. One way, though, to shift these bodyminds and align them with the ideals of inclusivity and antiableism is to employ the inklyuziya technology I call intercorporeal togetherness. By foregrounding bodyminds as forces and grounds of sociality, I point out that material and sensory anchors act as mechanisms of systemic exclusion and inclusion, thus contributing to anthropological scholarship on the making and breaking of the collective by sensory means. I show how they serve as platforms for exclusion’s continuous insidious and anonymized operation and, at the same time, how working with them opens up the potential to reconfigure sociality. АННОТАЦИЯ В этой статье я анализирую, как активисты и практики инклюзии в России создают контексты «настоящей инклюзии». Они это делают не через распространение информации об инклюзии или обеспечение инклюзивности на системном уровне, а посредством организации межличностного взаимодействия, основанного на «межкорпореальной совместности». Межкорпореальная совместность - это телесно сформированная отзывчивость и взаимность, способствующую преодолению разрыва между людьми с инвалидностью и без нее. Я утверждаю, что исключение людей с инвалидностью, движущей силой которого является эйблизм, усвояется на телесном уровне. Без внешнего импульса, сами по себе, социальные субъекты редко начинают практиковать инклюзию, даже в контекстах, где приняты соответствующие законы и программы. Однако один из способов изменить телесную усвоенность исключения и приблизить телесные практики к идеалам инклюзивности и антиэйблизма - использование технологии инклюзии, которую я называю межкорпореальной совместностью. Выдвигая на первый план телесность как движущую силу и основание социальности, я указываю на материальные и сенсорные маркеры, действующие как механизмы системного исключения и включения. Мой анализ вносит вклад в антропологические исследования того, как социальность создается и разрушается через телесное взаимодействие. Я пока- зываю, как телесное взаимодействие и привычки способствуют воспроизводству исключения людей с инвалидностью и, в то же время, как работа на телесном уровне открывает потенциал для реконфигурации социальности.
... outsiders and nonmembers" (DeNicolo et al., 2017, p. 503). Thus, we understand belonging as social connections and a subjective sense of attachment, which students actively construct through everyday practices, but which are framed and influenced by school practices, policies, and institutional structures (Abu El-Haj, 2015;DeNicolo et al., 2017;Jaffe-Walters, 2016). ...
This study draws on interviews and classroom observations with Latinx, English Learners (ELs) at a high school in Southeastern Virginia to analyze how this group of students builds social connections and constructs "belong-ing" at school. Findings indicate that these EL students' school experiences are framed by underdeveloped and ad hoc educational and support infra-structures aimed at serving their needs. Students turned to those with whom they shared language, culture, and ethnic affiliations to build networks of support; however, often these strategies to belong did not facilitate ongoing connections with students" English-speaking counterparts, hampering relationship building within the broader school community. We argue that school programming and institutional practices that holistically addressed these students' language, social, and educational needs, while incorporating their strengths as multicultural agents, would foster increased school belonging and alleviate a situation in which these students must choose between supportive relationships and acceptance and greater progress toward meeting academic goals. To deliver a truly equitable education to these students, schools must adopt reforms that address racial inequities and recognize these students" strengths and resilience as possessors of essential skills for navigating life in today's multicultural society.
... Their research examines the experiences of Latino diaspora youths from seven distinct Latin American nationalities, which by far makes their study complex, inclusive, and diverse as it illuminates new forms of transnational democratic citizenship, which is much more generalizable. Although other books (e.g., Gibson, Carrasco, P amies, Ponferrada, & R ıos-Rojas, 2013;Jaffe-Walter, 2016) draw upon ethnographic studies of the cultural production of identity, citizenship, and nationalism in a diverse transnational context, none of them employ PAR as a research approach that, through an iterative cycle of participation, action, and reflection, seeks to liberate participants by allowing them to name research problems and ask research questions. Additionally, some work on PAR (e.g., Cammarota & Fine, 2008;Machado-Casas et al., 2018) does not profoundly examine nationalism and transnationalism as what Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sep ulveda III do in their book Border Thinking. ...
This article examines the evolving discourse on race and racialization in Nordic elementary education research from 2010 to 2023. Over the past two decades, race has emerged as a critical analytical category in Nordic scholarship, reflected in a growing body of studies and academic conferences. The article first presents a quantitative overview of publication trends across Nordic countries, highlighting an increase in studies addressing racialization, racism, and educational inequality. It then provides a qualitative analysis of Danish studies, which have explored racializing practices, structures, discourses and racialized experiences. However, recent scholarship signals a shift towards race‐critical studies, legitimizing race as an analytical framework and moving research beyond documenting racialization to examining responses and resistance. This shift challenges Nordic colorblind ideologies, reinforcing race as a key analytical category and fostering a deeper understanding of structural inequalities in Nordic welfare‐state schooling.
This study aims to examine the phenomenon of urban Islamization in Jambi City and how it influences community preferences towards integrated Islamic schools compared to public schools or other Islamic-based schools. Utilizing a case study approach, this research explores the role of Integrated Islamic Schools in integrating curricula and extracurricular activities that support Islamic character development. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, participatory observation, and document analysis from various related sources. The results show that changes in the urban community's mindset towards Islamic education are influenced by social and cultural dynamics, including the role of community and social networks in educational decision-making. Additionally, these findings reveal the implications of urban Islamization on educational preferences, challenges, and opportunities faced by Islamic schools in the context of urbanization. The limitations of this study include the generalizability of the findings beyond Jambi City. In conclusion, urban Islamization in Jambi has led the community to choose integrated Islamic schools as a superior educational option, reflecting a shift in values and expectations towards Islamic education in the modern era. This phenomenon also reflects the strengthening dynamics of urban Islamization in Jambi City
This chapter introduces the concept of ‘interculturality regimes’ as structured frameworks for managing cultural diversity within societies and international orders. Interculturality regimes integrate regulatory mechanisms that shape cultural interactions, balancing inclusivity with governance imperatives. Drawing on revisited critical histories such as the Ottoman Empire’s code of Millet and the Lifan Yuan system of Qing China, the chapter highlights the political configuration of cultural diversity and its role in legitimising authority. It explores the dual processes of ‘interpellation’ and ‘counter-interpellation’, where dominant power structures and marginalised groups contest authorised forms of cultural expression. The chapter underscores the political dimensions of culture, illustrating how cultural beliefs and values underpin governance practices, power dynamics, and the governmentalisation of social relations.
Keywords: Interculturality regimes, Cultural diversity, Political authority, Interpellation, Counter-interpellation, Cultural legitimisation, Governance
https://www.routledge.com/The-Concise-Routledge-Encyclopaedia-of-New-Concepts-for-Interculturality/Dervin-Rboul-Chen/p/book/9781032816005?srsltid=AfmBOorDRevJ3hiW0wuyONY0cKWIPtKnoHILR855X4fjBTSTFT-0ih-5
How do schoolteachers negotiate challenging situations related to ethnic minority students? That is the question this chapter aims to answer. I use empirical data from memory work-inspired group interviews, where 24 lower secondary schoolteachers were asked to recall challenging situations related to ethnic minority students. Drawing on some of the most intense moments during the group interviews, I show how patterns of affective-discursive sense-making (Wetherell, Affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. In: Affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. SAGE, 2012) occur in the negotiations of the challenging situations related to ethnic minority students. The teachers’ negotiations of the challenging situations mainly take on familiar routes of culturally accepted discursive sense-making, however, there are also exceptions, creating further affective tensions within the room of teachers. I further notice how some of the teachers seem to be left with (unwanted) feelings of distance to the ethnic minority students, feelings of powerlessness, and even feelings of pain entangled in not being able to live up to what the teachers feel are their obligations. The teachers’ feelings are difficult to ignore, and the feelings can come to blur possible solutions to the challenging situations related to ethnic minority students.
This chapter explores the ways that racialized differences come to matter in the process of friendship making within a diverse Danish school setting. Drawing from an ethnographic study conducted in a racially diverse school in Copenhagen, Denmark, the chapter explores how, through the practice of lunch eating, young people navigate and develop their understandings of friendships, often positioning these relationships within racialized categories. Approaching the lunch break as a daily performance of the ritual, the chapter illustrates how friendship divisions between the students establish the status quo of social ordering, in which racially minoritized students are deemed to be forming segregated friendships. Theoretically, the chapter explores the possibilities to understand friendship as a performative boundary figure. Centering the question on what friendship does rather than what friendship is the chapter conceptualizes friendship as a performative social institution that can both dismantle and construct symbolic hierarchies of group divisions and boundaries.
Nation states want to control their populations, including how they reproduce. In the present era of migration, this involves not only restricting marriage migration from ethnic minorities’ countries of origin, but also involves attempts to affect Muslim marriages within their borders, as some such marriages can be considered ‘anti-modern’ and a potential threat to the state. Taking a governmentality approach – how states seek to shape ‘the conduct of conduct’ of its citizens – I explore the workings of a Danish policy initiative entitled the ‘Dialogue Corps’. The Corps members, who all have an ethnic minority background, conduct workshops with the particular aim of reducing parental involvement in ethnic minority youth’s partner choices. Based on observations and interview data, I document how workshop participants may actively resist Corps members’ problematisation of their intimate practices. Instead, participants both challenge the view that majority Danish practices are inherently superior and point out that state interference may make lives worse, rather than better, in ethnic minority families. While the policy initiative has the stated aim of improving the lives of ethnic minority youth, it may instead (re)produce notions of these youth as ‘Other’, thus positioning them unfavourably within hierarchical schemes of cultural and racial difference.
Purpose:This study explores the community-building practices of a school leader at a middle/high school in a Latino/a and African American community. I analyze how the principal leveraged his immigrant identity and experiences to connect with immigrant families and adapt to their needs to form a sense of belonging in the school and neighborhood. I focus on the power of immigrant and BIPOC school leaders drawing from their cultural practices to lead efforts for family engagement. Methods: My study draws on a 3-year critical ethnographic study. Qualitative data sources include participant observation of school/community events; interviews with school faculty, parents, and community members; and participatory methods. I draw on the concepts of pedagogies of acompañamiento and critical care to theorize practices that educators employ to forge relationships with families and create humanizing spaces. Findings: I argue that the school's principal, a Latino immigrant, functioned as a “border broker” in helping families find a sense of belonging in the school and community. He embodied pedagogies of acompañamiento as he accompanied parents through marginalizing experiences and created spaces where they could share and participate in decision-making. Discussion: I highlight the possibilities of pedagogies of acompañamiento in school spaces and recommend practices for school leaders in designing engagement strategies.
It is widely accepted that honor-based violence is a lived reality and a serious problem. However, honor-based violence is also a contested academic and political field, characterized by a polarized debate about whether or not the violence comprises stereotyping images of immigrants. This article asks how honor-based violence can be understood in light of this polarization, and what consequences it may have for clients and social workers. It is based on interview data with 235 adults with either professional ( n = 199) or personal experiences ( n = 36) of honor-based violence in Sweden. The data has been thematically coded and analyzed using the concepts of culturalization and intersectionality.
Findings
Honor-based violence is simultaneously a lived reality and teeming with stereotypes that are constructed by culturalizing images of nation, gender, age, religion, and sexuality. These stereotypes constitute forms of violence themselves and decrease clients’ trust in society and its institutions. Hence, the stereotypes become obstacles to social workers’ capacity to support those exposed to violence. At a general level, the stereotypes contribute to retaining the exposed in violence. In contrast, intersectional approaches to understanding honor-based violence have the potential to capture clients’ self-perceived and complex formulations of the causes of, and the character of, their situation, and thus increase the possibilities for adequate support.
Applications
The article's findings can support social workers’ understanding of the complexity of honor-based violence and strengthen their possibilities and capacities to develop antiracist and nonviolent communicative practices and, thus, acknowledge clients’ varying experiences and individual needs.
Drawing on narrative interviews with people who have recently or in the past fled to Denmark, this article examines experiences of being cast as refugees within the Danish asylum and integration bureaucracy. The analysis is situated within a social context formed simultaneously by Nordic exceptionalism and racial colour-blindness, and by increasing restrictions within Danish asylum and integration policy. Within this context, the article analyses narrative accounts of structural violence and racialization within three central sites of refugee management: namely the reception and asylum camps, encounters with municipal integration workers, and in contexts of schooling and employment. The analysis conveys intersubjective perspectives on how being labelled as a ‘refugee’ involves being racialized, managed and controlled and it argues that such forms of legally-sanctioned control measures can be understood as a slow violence that harms the lives of those seeking protection in Denmark. Finally, the article discusses how people labelled as ‘refugees’ respond to and oppose experiences of racism and control, and how such responses are often silenced in ways that further legitimize racism.
This article examines the intersecting oppressions of Danish welfare politics and its emerging interest in emancipating ‘immigrant’ women and girls. It draws on Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images and, based on a documentary text corpus, it identifies how the images of the unfree immigrant housewife and the inhibited immigrant girl are formed through oxymoronic liberal arguments of care and control. The article demonstrates how this plays out in an assemblage of policy documents and suggests why welfare professionalism is called upon to ‘rescue’ ‘immigrant’ women and girls, situating welfare politics and professionalism within the racial welfare state and its racial capitalist and Orientalist logics. The analyses demonstrate how gendered and racialized signifiers help to structure welfare politics and professionalism, and how a space of emancipation is intertwined with a global economic division of labor. The article suggests that racialized welfare politics and professionalism are permeated by the desire to emancipate women, which remains a powerful impulse within Danish welfare state capitalism, liberalism and social-democratic reasoning.
This chapter explores how certain political rhetoric and media discourses construct Muslim migrant men as a hindrance to both positive integration into Danish society and gender equality goals. It analyses these state of affairs as “neo-Orientalist assumptions,” where Muslim men are pictured as being the most “other” to Danish men. If Danish men are upheld as openminded, gender egalitarians, a “negative controlling image” of Muslim men portrayes these men as radicalised oppressors, who might constitute a danger to their wives and children. This chapter introduces the concept of mistrusted masculinity, which should be understood as an etic concept, to capture a social phenomenon within certain historical and social circumstances: a social phenomenon, which is “in the world,” produced and reproduced in negative images of the Muslim migrant man in media and political ideologies as well as shaped and reshaped in intersubjectivity.
This chapter explores how the negative controlling image of mistrusted masculinity plays out in intersubjective relations between Muslim migrant fathers and school professionals hindering a fruitful cooperation. We meet various Muslim migrant fathers who express how they must relate and navigate according to being mistrusted (or their own suspicion of being mistrusted) by school professionals, which leads to analysing these fathers’ subjective experiences and strategies to handle the mistrust. This chapter illuminates how experiences of being mistrusted are manifold and explores Muslim men’s subjectivities in light of this vilification; namely knowing they are “mistrusted,” they may end up experiencing mistrust as a way of being-in-the-world. This chapter also investigates how such mistrust entangles in some teachers’ concerns regarding lack of freedom within “Muslim childrearing.”
This book advances critical discussions about what coloniality, decoloniality, and decolonisation mean and imply in the Nordic region.
It brings together analysis of complex realities from the perspectives of the Nordic peoples, a region that is often overlooked in current research, and explores the processes of decolonisation that are taking place in this region. The book offers a variety of perspectives that engage with issues such as Islamic feminism and the progressive left; racialisation and agency among Muslim youths; indigenising distance language education for Sami; extractivism and resistance among the Sami; the Nordic international development endeavour through education; Swedish TV reporting on Venezuela; creolizing subjectivities across Roma and non-Roma worlds and hierarchies; and the whitewashing and sanitisation of decoloniality in the Nordic region.
As such, this book extends much of the productive dialogue that has recently occurred internationally in decolonial thinking but also in the areas of critical race theory, whiteness studies, and postcolonial studies to concrete and critical problems in the Nordic region. This should make the book of considerable interest to scholars of history of ideas, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, international development studies, legal sociology, and (intercultural) philosophy with an interest in coloniality and decolonial social change.
This article examines the complex process of teachers’ care for students in contexts of inclusive refugee education in Jordan, where Syrian refugees and Jordanian students study together. I illustrate that while teachers’ caring practices represent efforts to support refugee students, they are limited by teachers’ inability to see the social, structural, and systemic power dynamics that restrict Syrian refugees, reifying unequal relations of power between refugees and nationals. National teachers are embedded in the social fabric of the societies in which they live and not impervious to the discriminatory attitudes towards refugees, thereby limiting the extent of their care. This article illuminates the complexity of inclusive refugee education and concludes with implications for teacher education and professional development.
Social exclusion is complex, intractable, and devastating. It occurs where individuals or groups cannot fully participate in the typical activities of the societies in which they live, whether they are excluded economically, politically, or live in segregation. In this review, I highlight recent work in the area of social exclusion and ethnicity, focusing on Europe and Eurasia. Scholarship reveals ethnic hierarchies of exclusion in hiring and housing markets, educational approaches that cloak assimilationist practice in the language of inclusion, a plethora of strategies that minorities use to navigate exclusion, and more. While new research brings innovation and insight, it nevertheless remains fragmented along several dimensions. As scholars work to move the field forward, bridging substantive areas of exclusion, studying the complex dynamic of interactions between majorities and minorities, and collaborating across methodological divides would be particularly valuable.
This study explores the experience of teacher candidates and instructors in teacher education programs in California and Denmark. With both California and Denmark grappling with the way their current education system is or is not meeting the needs of the current population, this comparative study aims to better understand the dichotomy present. Through a set of interviews, the study focuses on the concepts of social responsibility and culturally sustaining pedagogies and how stakeholders experience these in their programs. Results show that Danish participants experience a more defined purpose and common understanding of the role of schooling in Danish society, and their role in it as teachers. Californian participants expressed a desire to reshape the state’s education system to be more racially and socially-just, but with varying ideas of how to achieve this. Implications of the comparison are discussed.
The revelation that the Trump administration separated immigrant children from their families at the U.S.–Mexico border and placed them in detention facilities sparked protests across the country in 2018. While the policy received swift backlash from the public and was widely derided as running counter to American values and the rule of law, a segment of the American public supports the policy. We argue that ethnocultural forms of nationalism—beliefs about religious, ethnic, and gendered criteria for “true Americanness”—help explain support for family separations. We test this argument using two surveys collected 2 years apart. In both data sets, we find substantial evidence that ethnocultural forms of nationalism are linked to support for family separation, while generalized nationalism is not.
In this article, I examine the ways in which secondary school administrators, nurses, and teachers in Victoria, Australia, are being taught to identify forced marriage as an emerging configuration of familial violence that has been codified in federal law. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Melbourne, Australia and its suburbs, I argue that school staff’s discomfort with the policy’s demand that they conduct risk assessments on their students produce non-disclosure as a more ethical expression of care for student wellbeing. Nondisclosure emerges as a strategy that hesitates to employ modes of victim recognition demanded by liberal biopolitical risk assessment protocols. Rather than viewing nondisclosure as a disengagement from the subject, this article shows how social welfare practitioners view nondisclosure as a way to re-engage with the broader political conditions that structure migrant families’ marital practices, including intensified border control policies and economic precarity in the wake of displacement.
Multi-sited ethnographies allow for a cross-cultural qualitative reading of schooling spaces. − Flags, crucifix and language regimes are sociocultural and political symbols that set the tone for narratives of belonging inside and outside of the classroom. − Transclusion (Biesta 2019) provides a fruitful concept to dissect and interpret how authority over space, language and resources is shared in schooling communities. − Drawing on Biesta's functions of education (qualification, socialization, subjectification), the three case studies give insights into the ways that space-marking indicates how schools prioritize one function of education over another. − Central European schools exist within the complex history of the continent and must be locally contextualized to understand how the "ruinations" (Abu El-Haj 2020) of the myth of monoethnic (Poland), segregated migrant labor districts (Germany) or multicultural communities (Austria) play out in the everyday lives of schools. − In the German-speaking schools, efforts were made to embrace diversity but the German language bias remained an uncontested site of power, achievement and discipline. − At the Polish site, emphasis on homogeneity and competition favors passive learning settings and renders diverse student needs invisible. Purpose: Against the backdrop of a global policyscape of inclusion, this paper investigates how three primary schools (Poland, Austria, Germany) mark entry halls and classrooms with state and religious symbolism and grant presence or absence of multilingualism. Design/methodology/approach: This multi-sited school ethnography investigates how EU educational policy projects on social justice and inclusion are appropriated and negotiated in the spaces of three Central European schools (Abu El-Haj et al. 2017; Levinson, et al. 2018). I build on Gert Biesta's concept of "transclusion" (2019) to interpret how school spaces appropriate EU inclusion policies and create a shared sense of community and belonging. Research limitations: Findings must be treated with caution as these are snapshots into the everyday life of three schools and cannot serve as general claims. Findings: Monoethnic expressions of religious faith (cross), national symbolism (flag) and language regimes co-construct national narratives that draw a line between those who belong and those who do not. Strong national narratives, communicated through entry hall decorations and classroom practices, allow little space for peripheral identities, i.e. migrant students, to claim voice and participate in the classroom and other shared spaces (Poland). Where there is less overlap between entry hall and classroom discourses (Austria), on the other hand, students receive mixed messages when it comes to their acceptance as Austrians. Blank spaces (Germany) presume a possibility to create shared spaces of communication and decision-making that students playfully engage in. However, in both Germany and Austria the ambivalence around space-marking means that language regimes are the more prominent factor in drawing the demarcation line between insiders and outsiders.
Antiracist pedagogies have long been conceptualized and developed by scholars, public intellectuals, teachers and pedagogues in Danish education contexts. By analysing Danish knowledge production on antiracist education from the 1980s to the present, this article traces changing understandings of race and racism in Danish education, as well as accounts for different affective tensions and investments at stake in antiracist pedagogical practice and thinking. We show how the discourse of antiracism as ‘tolerance work’ prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s evolved into an antiracist pedagogy centred on ‘creating good and positive atmospheres’, and how, from the 2000s onward, feelings of unease, embarrassment and anxiety about addressing race have become integrated in antiracist education research and practice. While the first approach towards antiracist education dwells with and use positive and joyous feelings, the second wave addresses a more uncomfortable register of affects. By analysing how different affective intensities have historically been associated with antiracist pedagogies in Denmark, we show how they are inextricable from education policies and politics.
This study examines the construction, navigation, and contestation of belonging for Syrian refugee youth in the context of inclusive refugee education in Jordan, where refugee students study alongside Jordanian nationals. I demonstrate how belonging is always in flux and constantly being negotiated across local, national, and transnational scales, at times reinforcing belonging and at other times contradicting and challenging it. I argue that these contradictions comprise the ongoing process of navigating and negotiating belonging.
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