Search

This paper examines the challenges that highly skilled immigrant workers face and their strategies of adaptation. We employ the term "precarious talent" to capture an often neglected aspect of skilled migration. Using both survey data and interviews on skilled Chinese and Indian immigrants in Singapore, we find that these migrants confront varying degrees of employment insecurity and settlement uncertainty in an era of neoliberal globalization, contrary to the common perception of "foreign talent" as a privileged group. We also find that skilled immigrants actively use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to mitigate precarity: they use the Internet and social media to access timely job information, sustain social contacts across national borders, and adapt to life and work in the host society. However, the ability to effectively cope with precarity depends on their own socioeconomic status, context of reception, and homeland development. We discuss theoretical implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Malaysia over the last decade, a more meaningful form of multiculturalism beyond mere tolerance has been encouraged through the 1Malaysia initiative of the Najib government. This paper explores how a framework of everyday multiculturalism can enhance our understanding of the ways Malaysian youth negotiate formal injunctions to build unity in diversity while an inequitable multiracialism persists both structurally and informally in Malaysian society. We illustrate how an everyday multiculturalism approach reveals on-the-ground processes of the (re)production of unequal difference and ordinary possibilities for interethnic conviviality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighbourhoods are important contexts for the socialization and adaptation of immigrant youth. They provide resources and opportunities for positive interactions with peers and non-family adults. But neighbourhoods differ systemically in their demographic composition and the type and quality of resources they offer young people. In the US, there is an implicit assumption equating suburban neighbourhoods with better schools, more jobs and higher quality housing compared to urban neighbourhoods. There is however, little explicit empirical evidence of how such differences may shape the experience of immigrant youth. This gap is concerning in light of recent trends of immigrants to move directly to the suburbs. The first part of the paper reviews the literatures on immigrant adaptation and neighbourhood effects. Drawing on two qualitative studies, the second part of the paper illustrates mechanisms through which suburban and urban neighbourhoods may influence the socialization and adaptation of immigrant youth growing up in them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently, the US has dramatically expanded immigration enforcement. At the same time, some advocates have sought to support “good” immigrants. This paper considers how the resulting good/bad binaries affect undocumented immigrants. I examine a case study in Los Angeles, where policing intertwined with protection. Based on participant observation and interviews, I show that respondents believed state agents classified them either as “bad” criminals or “good”, immigrants. To the extent immigrants identified as “good”, they credited the US with offering them “freedom” and hoped for political inclusion. At the same time, in what I call moralizing regulation, they also performed “good” behaviour and distinguished themselves from those seen as “bad”. Some also tied “good” behaviour to femininity and “acting white”. At the extreme, they blamed other migrants for inviting state mistreatment. The effects were ambivalent: while immigrants appreciated US support, they also adopted and adapted to the state’s moral norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Myanmar undergoes political and societal transition, observers are asking questions about citizenship and ethnic identity. How does one think about citizenship and people's negotiations with law in political-legal regimes that do not subscribe to liberal democratic norms? This paper investigates how law marginalizes the Burmese Chinese minority in Myanmar and the nature of their legal participation. Since law asserts cultural power impacting the way people think and behave, we engage with the concept of legal consciousness to understand how perceptions of legal vulnerability shape political subjectivity ambivalently. The paper highlights the spatial strategies and everyday practices that the Burmese Chinese deploy to navigate oppressive laws, but signals that internal social divisions and geopolitical considerations deter collective action towards rights assertion. It argues that studying the multiple sites and scales through which law is engaged contributes towards recovering citizenship aspirations where engagement with power and authority are articulated differently from Western norms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports the results of ethnographic research conducted in Darwin, a north Australian city with a growing population of Aboriginals and migrant newcomers. It is situated within the emerging literature on race, encounter, and affect and explores how events of phenotypical racism unfold in public spaces of the city. The paper argues that negative affects of hurt, anger, and frustration that saturate places through events of coding, labelling, and judging bodies hypervisible through phenotype have the potential to mutate through attention to forces in a more-than-human world. This paper shows that Elizabeth Grosz's concept of ‘geopower’, a non-human form of power that precedes and exceeds human social relations, provides the possibility to reconfigure anti-racist agendas – bodies of colour not only maintain minimum human dignity but affirm life and learn to live ethically with difference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper interrogates the structural conditions, macropolitics and governmentality of family ‘regroupement’ in France in an era of shifting immigration policies in Europe and the imaginative possibilities that Senegalese immigrants exercise to maintain family and kinship ties with those left behind. It argues that while the need to maintain ties from diasporic locations is mediated by policies, material and emotive transnational practices, the materiality of displacement as well as the state's politics of immigration render more elusive possibilities of maintaining family in situ. What tensions and creative strategies emerge? How is ‘home’, the primordial site of family structure, reimagined and reconstituted? Taking into account state's politics and immigrants’ entrapment within multiple spheres of power and their active agency as determinants, this paper uncovers how displacement gives rise to multiple ruptures while simultaneously motivating a search for active agency to reconstruct and reimagine kinship, family and conjugality across multiple temporalities and spatialities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies on transnational families argue that the subjective well-being of migrant parents is negatively affected by living separated from their children. Most studies employ qualitative methods without a control group and hence are not able to distinguish whether the effects found are associated with separation only or with other factors. This paper investigates the association between parental subjective well-being and parent–child separation by comparing migrant parents who have at least one child in their country of origin with those who live with all their children in the Netherlands. The paper further investigates whether the same associations are found between migrant groups from Angola and Nigeria. Results indicate that transnational parents indeed report lower subjective well-being, as measured by happiness, life satisfaction and mental health for both groups and additionally, self-assessed health for Angolans. However, legal status, socio-economic status and the quality of the parent–child relationship are found to be important mediators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores how the whiteness of converts to Islam affects their post-conversion experiences. It shows how white converts are privileged because their whiteness functions as a marker of dominance and respectability. In attempting to go beyond well-established observations about the existence of white privilege, the limits of white privilege are also considered. It is argued that upon converting to Islam, white converts' whiteness is jeopardized, thus showing the precariousness of whiteness. The paper also considers how converts' whiteness can cause them difficulties rather than benefits due to the unique context that they find themselves in. Unlike white supremacists who portray white people as always a victim however, this paper seeks a more balanced understanding of the complexity of whiteness as often-but-not-always privileging. This paper is based on thirty-seven in-depth interviews that were conducted between 2008 and 2009 with Muslim converts in Greater Manchester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethnic identity of second-generation immigrant youth has important implications for their association with, and integration in, receiving countries. This paper deals with the ethnic identity formation of second-generation Turkish immigrant youth in Germany, with particular attention paid to the notion of reactive ethnicity. While much of the literature discusses the ethnic retention of this specific group as unwillingness to integrate, this paper frames their ethnic identity formation as reactive ethnicity, which emerges in reaction to social exclusion. Utilizing a case study of Turkish students of disadvantaged schools, the article illustrates that reactive ethnicity is strongly linked to perceived discrimination and that it acquires characteristics of resistance when the dominant group denigrates and invalidates the immigrants' culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the identities that North American lifestyle migrants in Ecuador adopt as they adjust to life in a new racialized social environment. It is based on qualitative interviews with migrants from North America, as well as ethnographic field notes. North Americans describe their growing community in racialized terms and adopt a series of practices that demonstrate anxiety about their position in the racialized social order of Ecuador. The paper discusses the strategies that North American migrants engage in to diminish the importance of their racialized identities in Ecuador. I identify two main practices that complicate North American incorporation in Ecuador: self-policing practices that aim to optimize Ecuadorians' perceptions of them; and desires for integration and ethnic mobility, which seek to erase their ‘Otherness’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using ethnographic data on Boston's Haymarket Square, this paper demonstrates how public space and a market opportunity can generate solidarity among people of different ethnicities in the form of a cosmopolitan canopy, and how a single ethnic tradition can nurture an open, public multi-ethnic environment. The paper illustrates how Haymarket vendors' treatment of ethnic and racial difference is actively deployed in the construction of new groups that largely transcend such distinctions. This article outlines the mechanisms by which a cosmopolitan canopy is sustained, and how it serves a constructive social function within the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New migration flows to Mexico are challenging long-established sociocultural configurations. So far, most studies on immigrants in Mexico have focused on singular ethno-national groups rather than paying attention to the intermingling of people. This paper presents an examination of diversification processes occurring in Guadalajara, Mexico. We contend that these are particularly strained because of the continuing frictions with which the country has to deal due to its already-existing diversity. The many forms of discrimination and racism that many Mexicans are subjected to by their co-nationals are often extended to new arrivals. The increasing complexity of migrant inflows challenges established forms of prejudice in everyday interactions. We argue in this paper that the use of superdiversity as a lens to study diversification processes allows us to better understand the changing dynamics currently taking place in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks comparatively at the process of social change and its impact on local community cohesion in two Melbourne suburbs, ‘Northburb’ and ‘Greenburb’. The two localities are geographically close, part of the same local government area and both highly ethnically diverse, but considerably different in terms of their socio-economic and ethnic profiles. Based on ethnographic data collected through individual interviews, focus groups and participant observation in 2012–2013, the paper shows how the process of deindustrialization and the switch to service economy over the past decades took distinctly different turns in the two localities. Our data suggest that the processes of social change seem to have diminished local community cohesion in both localities. In Northburb, gentrification has contributed to socio-economic polarization, while Greenburb has lagged behind in socio-economic indicators and experienced ethnic fragmentation due to a considerable influx of new immigrant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper speaks against tolerance as an instrument of institutionalized anti-racism within academia where collegiality is a minimal expectation in interpersonal interactions. Through auto-ethnographic readings, the discussion focuses on the racial affective economies produced in universities as tolerance ‘makes race ordinary’. Within this reading, ‘making race ordinary’ is shown to produce unliveable lives because of its racial affective economies animated by contemptuous tolerance, disgust and disattendability. These negative affects emerge within the epistemology of ignorance produced by the racial contract and have affective and career consequences for racialized others placed outside of organizational networks. The paper argues that to destabilize the white power in networks that decide on access, tenure and promotion and to enable liveable lives within universities, the transformative potential of the transracial intimacy of friendship must be engaged. This entails ‘race made ordinary’ through disalienation-estrangement from the ‘raced’ subject positionings of the racial contract. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prior studies on Roma migration put much emphasis on either structural factors or networks that become key elements for explaining the growing migration flows of a population lacking economic resources and characterized by poor education. Although very relevant for explaining the perpetuation of migration, these studies posit the limit of downplaying migrants' agency and the role of identity markers mediating the influence of structural conditions in both destination and origin countries. Drawing on quantitative data from the Roma Inclusion Barometer (2006) as well as on in-depth interviews with Roma migrants from Eastern Romania, the paper provides a more comprehensive account of contemporary Romanian Roma migration towards Western European countries. The paper challenges the portrayal of the Roma migrant population, as conveyed by many scholars, as a rather passive one and argues that gender, religion and subgroup identities constitute key elements in explaining Roma migrants' agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the emerging critiques of inequalities in the access to water by focusing on three inter-related aspects: affordability, accessibility and quality of water. Based on extensive fieldwork, the paper explores the situation in segregated Roma settlements in Slovakia and highlights the critical role of power asymmetries at a local level. It builds a conceptual framework using Bourdieu’s notions of “social field”, “habitus”, “doxa”, and “capital”, highlighting the central role of power asymmetries at a local level. Insights are drawn on how dominantly positioned social actors command decision-making regarding water supply, and how social hierarchies, inequalities and the “positionality” of Roma as a marginalized group are functional to the lack of political will to address insufficient water access for Roma in any efficient manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses semi-structured interviews with Ecuadorian "white mestizos" of the upper classes to provide insights into the nature of racism in Ecuador. Interview data illuminate the specifics of racism and discrimination suffered by some of those labelled as mestizos, demolishing anew the idea of a homogenous mestizaje. Longo and cholo emerge as specific ethnic terminology used to create a racial/class distinctions among mestizos struggling for ethnoracial capital in a newly defined plurinational and intercultural state. These findings are contrasted with recent progressive state policies that address the plight of groups historically marginalized or ignored by the Ecuadorian narrative of mestizaje, but fail to look within mestizaje to battle against the remnants of colonial constructions of power and difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I address the diaspora tourism of children of migrants. Based on a case study of second-generation Eritreans, I reveal how journeys to parents' home countries affect the sense of belonging of the second generation. Applying a translocal perspective, I understand diaspora tourism as a translocal phenomenon which is both based on and creates interconnectedness between individuals and places. I illustrate different locally grounded situations and the socio-spatial interconnectedness that second-generation Eritreans experience at various places in the course of their journey in Eritrea. I conclude that diaspora tourism and the associated experiences at the places visited represent crucial identity-establishing events for second-generation Eritreans and influence the negotiation of their belonging and positioning towards both Eritrea and the Eritrean diaspora. This paper contributes to the debate on second generation and belonging by focusing on how localities and socio-spatial interconnectedness affect the negotiation of second-generation Eritreans' belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses analysis of interview transcripts and notes from participant observation to explore white reactions to the introduction of diversity management in a large public sector workplace in Glasgow. The paper analyses white talk about racial equality in a social context where the shaming, exclusion and demonization of disadvantaged groups including migrants, asylum seekers and the poor have ensured that issues of entitlement and race are highly charged. It is suggested that in such contexts diversity management is being wielded as a new kind of civility by middle-class people invested in the objectification of poor whites. This represents a form of class conflict over belonging within the body of whiteness that risks reinforcing rather than redressing racial resentments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on ethnographic research carried out in Birmingham, UK – a city significant for its sizeable Muslim population and its iconic role in the history of minority ethnic settlement in Britain – to consider how associations of place and ethnicity work in different ways to inform ideas about ‘Muslim community’ in twenty-first-century Britain. The paper charts happenings around a local event in an area of majority Asian settlement and how representations of the area as a place of Muslim community were used to implicate it in the ‘war on terror’. The paper goes on to show how this sensibility is disrupted by Muslims themselves through alternative engagements with space and ethnicity. The paper argues that these offer a ground for making Muslim community in ways that actively engage with histories and patterns of ethnic settlement in the city rather than being determined by them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the generational progress of ethnic minorities in Britain by analysing four labour market outcomes: economic inactivity, unemployment, access to salaried jobs and self-employment. An important contribution of this paper is the possibility to examine the impact of a range of cultural and social resources on employment outcomes, namely language fluency, co-ethnic spouse, co-ethnic employer, bridging and bonding social capital. Controlling for ethnic and religious identities, individual, social and human capital characteristics, it finds clear advantages of language proficiency in obtaining employment and salaried jobs. However, the second generation shows little advancement in all the outcomes examined and a particularly strong religious penalty is found among Muslim women. It concludes that persistent ethno-religious penalty experienced by the second generation poses a serious policy challenge and does little to strengthen our economy or in building a cohesive society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the social ties forged by Romanians in London with migrants of different origins in work and non-work contexts to offer a more nuanced view of ‘bridging’ social ties and related discussions of ‘everyday’ cosmopolitanism. Contrary to the overemphasis on ethnic ties seen as a form of bonding in migration research, the paper shows how Romanians bridge informally with many other migrants based on shared ‘non-native’ status. Alongside non-ethnically marked commonalities, ethnicity emerges as an important ingredient of cosmopolitan socialization, yet without necessarily signalling coexisting ethnic identities, as commonly assumed. Romanians' experiences further show that despite providing significant social and cultural capital, bridging ties with migrants, rather than natives, rarely accrue effective resources for social mobility. The findings suggest the need to disaggregate and qualify current understandings of ‘bridging’ social ties usually depicted in positive terms and uniformly as cross-ethnic relationships, or only linked with the ‘mainstream’ population. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies on migration and integration in Britain have noted the paucity of research on ‘new’ migrants, especially ‘illegal’ migrants and asylum seekers. This paper focuses on one understudied group – Albanian immigrants and their children – and looks at their migration and settlement, based on sixty interviews conducted in two phases either side of a 2003 mini-amnesty that gave many indefinite leave to remain. This regularization is the fulcrum around which our analytical narrative is built. Focusing on the interaction of migrants' agency with host-country structure, the paper shows that an unsettled asylum policy and delays in implementation have had deleterious effects on migrants' integration and sense of belonging, even after citizenship acquisition. As they search for a social and ethnic positioning within a multi-ethnic host society, the eventual realization of Albanians' migration project is accompanied by culture shock, intergenerational difference and ambivalence towards integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is a methodological reflection on the experiences of a white Irish woman researching ethnicity in England. Ethnic identity is described as a performance between two social actors that requires the collusion of both parties in order to be socially accepted. The history and disputes around the white Irish ethnic group category in England are discussed. Through the use of fieldnotes and interview extracts, I discuss how I became aware that my ethnic identity was not always recognized by participants, and in some cases the distinction between white Irish and white British was denied. At the micro level, this affects my rapport with individual participants, while at the macro level it resonates with historical relationships between Ireland and England. I argue that such experiences can lead to an existential threat to a person’s ethnic identity and therefore that the status of white Irish identity in England can be fragile. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on fieldwork conducted among Roma living in Turin (Northern Italy), this paper analyses the processes surrounding the exit routes taken by Roma out of nomad camps. Starting with the overview of national policy to face the disadvantaged housing situation, it explores the agency and the active strategy of Roma in the improvement of their disadvantaged living condition. Housing careers are the centre of the analysis in a comparative perspective: those of Roma leaving informal slums are compared with those of Roma leaving municipality camps. The article focuses on different factors and social mechanisms that explain different pathways, in the frame of constraints and opportunities. Individual preferences and resources, as well as institutional and structural constrains are part of the explanation. The results show the complexity of the universe of preferences and opportunities, stressing advantages and weaknesses of governmental policy and other external constraints in the decision-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces a group of white working-class women living on a council estate in the UK drawing on an ethnographic study conducted between 2005 and 2009, examining the impact of class inequality and a stigmatized living space in an ethnically diverse urban neighbourhood. All of the women are mothers and have mixed-race children; they reside on the St Ann's estate in Nottingham, an inner-city neighbourhood that has been subject to poor housing, poverty and unemployment for many generations. The women who live on this estate say that they suffer from negative stereotypes and stigmatization because of the notoriety of the estate, because they are working class and because they have had sexual relationships with black men. However, there is a sense of connectedness to the estate and there are strong cultural meanings that are heavily influenced by the West Indian community. This paper then highlights the importance of place when focusing upon families, class inequality and intercultural relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I discuss my life history study on experiences of race in the lives of Jewish-Canadian and Jewish-American birth mothers of children from black/white interracial, inter-religious relationships. Opening with a reflection on my personal experience and what compelled me to undertake this research, I then provide a short introduction to attitudes about interracial/inter-religious relationships found in the literature, followed by an introduction to my research methodology. Finally, I compare and contrast the experiences of three Jewish-American mothers, excerpted from their published narratives, and the experiences of two Jewish-Canadian mothers from two recorded interviews, with my own experience. I conclude this paper with a brief summary of the emerging themes in my research and how they add to our understanding of mothering across racialized boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the political and media discourses on Roma in Hungary, Finland and the UK, in relation to the local Roma in these countries as well as those who migrated from Central and Eastern Europe countries following the fall of communism. The authors have analysed left of centre and right of centre major newspapers in these three countries, focusing on specific case studies which were the foci of public debates during the last two decades. We also examined a common case study in 2013 (“blond Maria”) that was discussed throughout Europe. In each news paper, the constructions of Roma, local and migrant, and the changes to related discourses over the period were studied. In conclusion, we examine the multi-layered processes of social and political borderings in Europe which dominate discourses on Roma, “indigenous” and migrant, and the extent to which they constitute a coherent “European” construction of “the Roma”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper relates intersectionality to the construction of urban borders based on a case study of Roma neighbourhoods in Budapest. In doing this the authors focus on rationales behind appropriating and demarcating urban spaces according to political, ethno-territorial and economic agendas. We are concerned with bordering as reflected in representations of neighbourhood in Budapest’s VIII District and socio-ethnic issues that have been framed in conjunction with urban development. This includes the selective ways Roma-specific issues are made visible, or in fact masked, through ostensibly “colour-blind” policies. Furthermore, we relate these representations to concrete impacts of urban renewal with regard to challenges of multi-ethnicity but also to often exclusionary practices of border-making. Indeed, while not an officially proclaimed policy, social segregation is eagerly pursued in practice. However, this is only part of the story as we can clearly identify attempts to create a sense of Roma belonging and pride. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes the importance of examining not only how and when diasporas are mobilized by political brokers, but also which members of diasporic populations are strategically engaged both according to their own characteristics (including their age) and the nature of their diasporic hosting context. It explores how Sahrawi refugee children and youth in the Algeria-based Sahrawi refugee camps, Cuba, Syria and in Spain have been mobilized by their political representatives (Polisario), asking why particular cohorts of youth have been actively encouraged to promote and protect ‘the Sahrawi cause’, while other members of the diaspora have not. Drawing on a framework that facilitates comparison both within and across cases, the paper argues that a combination of factors influence the extent to which the Polisario is able and interested in activating the support of Sahrawi children and youth, including the characteristics of the students themselves, their position within the respective host contexts, and the space and resources available to the Polisario/SADR in each location. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the idea of ‘superdiversity’ at the city level through two churches with different approaches to architectural visibility: the hypervisible Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the invisible Igbo Catholic Church, both in North London, guide our exploration of invisible Nigerian London. Although Nigerians have lived in London for over 200 years, they live beneath the radar of policy and public recognition rather than as a vital and visible element of superdiversity. This paper argues that we can trace the journeys composing Nigerian London in the deep textures of the city thus making it visible, but this involves re-mapping space and ethnicity. It argues that visibility is vital in generating more open forms of urban encounter and, ultimately, citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The mounting tide of foreign fighters leaving Britain for the Middle East to fight, sacrifice or find new lives has blighted European governments and led to the further tightening up of counter-terrorism measures. Since the first British arrest of a Syrian returnee (Choudhury) in 2014, the latest figures of foreign fighter returnees have surged to approximately 800. A number of strategies aimed at thwarting these trends have surfaced including a call upon Muslim parents to scrutinise their children’s attitudes and behaviour and to be watchful of their radicalization. Based on a study in the West Midlands (in the UK), the paper provides a snapshot of how Muslim parents have received calls upon them to report their actual or potentially radicalized children to the police. We argue that current practices are likely to be ineffective unless more democratic spaces are provided for free political expression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the inter-group difference in social leverage ties between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Ürümchi, China. Social leverage ties refer to high-status ties such as professionals and managers who can provide egos with information or access to education, training, employment, etc. Existing studies have suggested three hypotheses (i.e. retention of culture, homophily and neighbourhood poverty) for the mechanisms of ethnic differences in network composition. Based on the survey data the author collected in 2005, this paper suggests another main mechanism – state policies – in explaining the ethnic variations. State policies have led to in-group association and ethnic inequalities, which have limited Uyghur access to high-status individuals. Data analysis shows the Uyghur–Han difference in social leverage ties controlling for key background characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores significant factors influencing the process of Arab American racial formation. I bring into conversation theories of racial formation and ‘political shock’ in social movement scholarship to develop the notion of ‘racialized political shock’ as an important factor in how racial and ethnic groups mobilize and organize. Many moments of political shock are highly racialized and have the potential to reorder the racial and ethnic landscape in ways that can open opportunities or introduce constraints to mobilizations around racial formation. Drawing on existing studies of Arab Americans, this paper highlights how Arab American racial formation has been galvanized during moments of racialized political shock. In the Arab American case, these moments have led to a call for recognition outside the category of white. I conclude by outlining ways forward in the study of Arab Americans, who have been overlooked in studies of race and ethnicity in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Immigrant women are a particularly vulnerable part of the immigrant population. In this paper we analyse negative attitudes towards immigrant women in Norway. We focus on immigrant women’s formal job qualifications, their religious background and wearing of hijab – the headscarf sometimes used by Muslim women. Using survey-embedded experiments we are able to analyse the net effects on attitudes of job qualifications, Islamic religious background and the hijab. The results show that native population frequently has more negative views of Muslim women who wear a hijab. The negative effects of a hijab do not seem to be strongly reduced if a woman wearing it has higher education. With a single exception, the results also show that Muslim backgroundin itself(i.e. without the hijab) does not have any strong effect on attitudes of the native population towards immigrant women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many scholars have cited socioeconomic status, cultural tastes, and group reference as the major determinants of class identification. Few have conceptualized minority ethnicity as a vital source of class subjectivities, however. I address this knowledge gap in this paper by examining Uyghur subjective class status in Ürümchi, China. I show that income and occupational attainment are not correlated with Uyghur choices of class labels. I also show that Uyghur ethnic identity affects their choices of class labels. I argue that Uyghurs think that they are a dominated group and compare themselves with Han Chinese unfavourably when defining their subjective class positions in Ürümchi. As a result, intergroup competition overshadows the variability in socioeconomic attainments among different Uyghur groups. The implications of these findings for research on class identification in multi-ethnic societies are discussed. Data are drawn from a survey (N = 900) conducted in Ürümchi in 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon research conducted with young people in the city of Leicester, England, this paper explores what it means for those from black and minority ethnic communities, particularly more recent arrivals, to live within and adapt to specific multicultural urban contexts. After introducing prevailing racisms and accommodations, the paper examines how forms of belonging are expressed, re-produced and negotiated through the spatial trajectories of everyday life. This includes the value of emerging versions of place through community, religious practice as a form of social capital, the importance of routine, and the construction of multifaceted identities. Such experiences relate to contingent hierarchies of acceptance and legitimacy, histories of settlement, economic marginalization, as well as gendered and generational roles. These young people negotiate everyday life and belonging by retaining, extending and forging local and trans-national ties; highlighting the relationship between socio-spatial positions, everyday practice and identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By describing the everyday lives of African migrant mothers and their children in Morocco, this paper highlights how migration and ‘immobility’ in so-called ‘transit countries’ are gendering and gendered experiences. Relying on migrants' narratives, the paper demonstrates how migrants' transitions to motherhood create both specific and gendered spaces for agency and particular and gendered constraints upon agency that shape women migrants' mobility dynamics in space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the role of recreational sport as a means and marker of social integration by analysing the lived experiences of Somali people from refugee backgrounds with sport. Drawing on a three-year multi-sided ethnography, the paper examines the extent to and ways in which participation in sport contributes to Somali Australians' bonding, bridging, and linking social capital. It is shown how social bonds and bridges developed in the sports context assist in the (re)building of community networks that have been eroded by war and displacement. Sport's contribution to social capital should however be neither overstated nor over-generalized. Bridging social capital in sport is relatively weak and few bridges are established between Somalis and the host community. Negative social encounters such as discrimination and aggression can highlight and reinforce group boundaries. Access to and use of linking social capital is also unequally distributed across gender, age, ethnic, and socio-economic lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovative approaches to citizenship emerged in the 1990s. Post-national theory suggested that European minorities no longer needed national citizenship because supra-national political structures such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) offered them protections. Denationalized citizenship held that universal human rights were now available at the national level too as the Council of Europe's member countries had to incorporate human rights principles within their own jurisdictions. New forms of claims-making among European Muslims were cited as evidence of this trend as religious claims, especially relating to the hijab, began to be made through human rights litigation. This paper demonstrates the limits of post-nationalism through a discussion of the outcomes of such claims. While European Muslims are indeed mobilizing around human rights, there is no evidence – at the level of litigation – that this has helped them to win recognition of their religious or cultural rights. This paper explores the reasons for this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on data collection and research methods on ethnic/racial discrimination, and more particularly on the question of 'ethnic statistics'. Taking the case of the European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), an international body whose tasks include providing European overviews of data on discrimination, the paper addresses the problem of the comparability of discrimination data. Drawing upon the experience of the FRA, the paper describes how the problem of comparability is addressed by working at three levels: the first is to produce reports mapping available data, highlighting gaps, and explaining when and why data are not comparable. The second is to initiate primary research - such as the EU-MIDIS survey of migrants and minorities - specifically designed to produce comparable data. The third level is to contribute to political and policy discussion to help raise awareness of the need for convergence in data collection practices between EU member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The renewed upsurge in ethnic and communal conflicts in Nigeria has generated increased interests in ethnic conflicts studies. A dominant approach in the literature is the concentration on the study of inter-ethnic conflicts at the expense of intra-ethnic conflicts. However, experiences have shown that intra-ethnic conflicts are as equally preponderant and bloody as inter-ethnic conflicts, suggesting that considerable research attention be directed at them. This paper sheds light on the perseverance of sub-ethnic identities and conflicts in Nigeria. It traces the evolution of ethnic conflict research in Nigeria, explores the existing literature on ethnic conflicts and points to the neglect of intra-ethnic conflicts. The consequence, the paper concludes, is that knowledge of ethnic conflicts in Nigeria is likely to be insufficient and undeveloped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth in 'high-risk' urban zones in France see police discrimination and brutality as a fundamental problem in their relationship to the state, but the state insists on marginalizing or silencing issues of racism and police impunity. At first glance, it seems that mainstream society and its political representatives are indifferent to the racial and ethnic dimension of violence that takes place in marginalized minority neighbourhoods. This paper takes a closer look at how the strength of entrenched French institutions and of police unions play a large roll in institutionalized racism. This paper argues that a lack of institutional accountability within the French culture of governance also helps us to understand why the French national police are so reluctant to embrace the community policing model or to register the persistent histories and geographies of intersecting racial, post-colonial and class hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than half a million foreigners reportedly resided in South Korea in 2006, with international migrant workers accounting for a majority. Although the country's reliance on imported foreign labour is likely to continue unabated, the country prides itself as being an ethnically homogenous society and insists on an almost zero-immigration policy. However, this paper argues that Korean society is rapidly becoming a multicultural society and that this process is inevitable and irreversible. In support of this argument, the paper examines various social factors that are contributing to the making of a multi-ethnic Korea, including the continuing influx of foreign workers, rapid ageing of the population, low fertility rate and shortage of brides. The paper also assesses the applicability of various theories and trends of migration to the Korean context. The Korean case affirms the globalization and acceleration of international migration, as practically every society is affected by it and as the number of migrants continues to increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a focus on institutional anti-racism challenges structural formations of racialized inequality, the inattention to quotidian resistance misses the complex manner in which racism is negotiated in everyday life. Examining ‘everyday anti-racism’ can better identify the cultural repertoires that frame how individuals deal with racism across different contexts. This paper shares findings from ethnographic research with migrants living in Sydney. Specifically, it focuses on middle-class Filipino migrants and their use of social mobility to manage routine racism. The experience of middle-class racial minorities presents distinct perspectives as their strategies do not sit comfortably with anti-racism ideals of ‘equality for all’. I advance the concept of everyday anti-racism to argue for a broader anti-racism politics that captures situated approaches to combating racism. Furthermore, I propose that the identity repair in middle-class contexts offer a chance to build anti-racism praxis that cuts across traditional solidarities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on building a theory of collective singularity using the case of anti-racist collectives targeting the marginalized Roma minority in the Czech Republic. The collective singularity concept is one in which the values, norms, and practices that constitute a collective render it impossible for the group to transcend its own axioms in any manner other than by rejecting precisely these constitutive elements. The concept of anti-racism contains the trope of ‘the other’, perceived not only as an object of protection, integration, assistance, and interest, but also as an object under pressure to find its own (anti-)concept. Anti-racism oscillates around four dispositives (hysteria, paternalism, individualism, bionumerics) and finds itself unable to follow a radical pluralism with the potential to undermine the roots of the hegemonic discourse. As a result, the dispositives of anti-racism essentially become a ‘hidden’ form of disciplination, reproducing oppression and the impossibility of self-deconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies of transnationalism typically frame it in opposition to the entrapping effects of borders. Yet, for many people, transnationalism is negotiated in contexts marked by forced separation and differential mobility. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among West Bank and Israeli Palestinians, this article explores transnational ties and orientations in relation, not in opposition, to the entrapping effects of borders. Specifically, I examine the two-way traffic in emotions and perceptions that marks family, social and symbolic relationships between West Bank and Israeli Palestinians. I show how entrapping and transnational processes combine to generate a tense interplay between closeness and distance, solidarity and estrangement. The paper calls attention to complex transnational formations among people prone to entrapment such as detained and deported migrants, refugees and minorities divided by rigid borders, and it suggests that a focus on emotions and perceptions is critical if we are to understand such formations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the slow but steady transformation in how Coptic identity has been articulated and expressed since the mid-1990s. In the past, Copts were careful not to challenge a particular narrative of national unity, which formally included Copts in the Egyptian nation (‘religion is for God, and the nation is for all’), but which in practice imposed a kind of public invisibility on them. Today, a growing number of activists are seeking a public identity for Copts, a form of the ‘politics of recognition’ and the ‘right to difference’. This is a controversial approach within the Coptic community, as well as between the Copts and the Muslim majority and the Egyptian state, and to some extent has required new vehicles for Coptic self-organization and expression, outside the older ‘neo-millet’ institutions that had governed Coptic life for decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]