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This article explores the effects of the UK citizenship test on migrants through the focus on the injunction to become an active citizen. We draw on qualitative interviews with 158 migrants of different nationalities who are at various stages in the process. We identify two responses. First, participants in our study drew on neo-liberal repertoires of active (knowledgeable) citizenship whereby they proved they are responsible and law-abiding agents of ‘social cohesion’ yet also simultaneously presented themselves as politically passive. Second, some participants perform critical, alternative narratives which contrast with the neo-liberal understanding of active citizenship. We note that these responses are not mutually exclusive and show the process of making sense of and positioning oneself around the competing, unsettled understandings of what counts as ‘active’ and what it means to be a citizen. The coexistence of these different responses shows that migrants going through the citizenship test process experience this policy instrument – and the injunctions on which it is based – in unsettling and contradictory ways. Through the citizenship test, and specifically the call to be an active citizen, adherence is sought to particular values – ‘British values’ – and the performance of active dispositions in a certain way. However, the neoliberal understanding of what it means to be an active citizen is also exceeded and challenged, in sometimes quite ‘ordinary’ and everyday ways. These coexisting and contradictory narratives bring to light the uncertainties through which migrants perceive the injunction to become an active citizen and the paradoxes of active citizenship more generally.

Drawing on our comparative research project conducted in six European cities, this article proposes a tentative politics of exhaustion as a way to understand the promise and perils of women of colour activists’ solidarity work. Through an examination of how women of colour activists strategise, organise and mobilise, we demonstrate the political and psychological impact of exhaustion. To declare exhaustion, we argue, is to hail the equally exhausted to build solidarity. Understanding the politics of exhaustion can help shed light on the creative practices of women of colour activists in European cities today, as well as highlight the structural processes that demand activists’ exhaustion.

This article explores the different experiences of migrant women who are at various stages in the UK naturalisation process, drawing on interviews in Leicester and London, United Kingdom. We consider how care and coloniality shape migrant women¿s experiences in the context of the neoliberal test process and what Nancy Fraser has called a 'crisis of care' (Fraser 2016). We argue that migrant women claim their own citizenship despite rather than because of the naturalisation process, and in so doing resist colonial relations of citizenship.

In this short contribution, we attempt to explore the ways in which austerity measures – deficit reductions through tax increases and cuts to public spending – generate unexpected political subjectivities among women of colour activists in Britain. In particular, we ex- amine how the dramatic cuts to public spending and the privatization of public services simultaneously subject women of colour by further destabilizing their already precarious economic position and create new possibilities for women becoming radical agents for social change. We argue that the dynamic for mapping this process of women of colour becoming new (or, at least, different) political agents is found in the oftentimes disrespected and devalued social relations of caring and care work (Erel, 2011). We argue that caring for and about Others is a dual process of subjectivation through the (re) privat- ization of care through the roll back of the social welfare state and a politics of becoming which generates new solidarities for collective action among women of colour.

With their focus on mourning, amnesia and counter-hegemony on shifting terrain in Britain, Gargi Bhattacharyya and Kim Allen have addressed the spirit of our book and added their own. Nicole Gregoi...

We situate racialized migrant mothers as political actors in the landscape of austerity in England and Scotland. We explore the possibilities of a politics around caring work. We ask: What “caring subjects” are possible, under austerity? A “politics of care” can challenge the dichotomy between private caring and public citizenship practices. However, we argue that the shift from a “culture of care” to a “culture of cuts” poses significant challenges to this politics in third sector spaces, particularly when processes of racialization are brought to the fore. We move beyond “reductionist economism” to explore how the current economic crisis is also one of social relations. The re-privatization of caring and reproductive work generates new forms of subjectivity and social reproduction. Within the supposed “monolith” of neoliberalism, a multiplicity of subjectivities are engendered which open some spaces for resistance and subversion.\ud \ud

Based on their study of minority women’s activism in the context of the economic crisis in Scotland, England and France, the authors question how well third sector organisations, policy-makers and social movements have responded to minority women’s perspectives and needs arising from austerity and racism. Apart from being disproportionately affected by the cuts, minority women are also undermined by dominant discourses which can (mis)represent them as either ‘victims’ or ‘enterprising actors’. There appears, from the excerpted interviews, to be a disconnect between minority women’s experiences and analyses of their precarity, their desire to take radical action and the compliant and domesticating projects and programmes that are currently being offered by some of their third sector ‘allies’.

In this chapter, we explore how the changing politics of the third sector under austerity problematises minority women’s intersectional social justice claims in Scotland, England and France. We begin by exploring the ‘governable terrain’ of the third sector in each country since the 1990s. As the principle of a ‘welfare mix’ becomes normalised in each country, the reality of having different welfare providers vying for state contracts seems to prompt isomorphic changes whereby third sector organisations refashion themselves in the image of the private sector as a necessity for survival. We then move on to discuss the impact these changes in the third sector are having on minority women’s activism. We analyse how the idea of enterprise has become entrenched within these organisations and how an enterprise culture is problematically reshaping the ways in which organisations think about their mission, practices and programmes of work—especially in relation to minority women. We conclude with a discussion about what the marketisation of the third sector means for minority women. We argue that political racelessness is enacted through enterprise as minority women’s interests are de-politicised and de-prioritised through the transformation of the third sector.

In this chapter we examine in detail minority women’s institutionalised precarity in pre and post crisis France, England and Scotland. Even though minority women experience systemic social and economic inequalities, too often their experiences are erased or devalued by social movement allies and policymakers alike. This is political racelessness enacted through both political discourse and empirical data gathering and analysis. We argue that minority women experience a paradox of misrecognition—they are simultaneously invisible and hypervisible in the constructions of poverty, the crisis and austertiy. Using an intersectional framework, we will demonstrate how minority women, a heterogeneous group, experience systematic discrimination and multidimensional inequalities based on their race, class, gender and legal status. In this chapter we focus specifically on minority women’s experiences in the labour market as access to the labour market and the quality of available work is a key determinant of poverty and inequality. We also explore the particular ways in which minority women are either rendered invisible or hypervisible in key social policies meant to address their routinised inequalities.

In this chapter we sound a further alarm as the European racial contract becomes more explicitly hateful and gains mainstream legitimacy and acceptability, with profound implications for minority women. We consider the ‘burkini ban’ and mass surveillance of Muslim citizens in France, the spike of racism in post-Brexit referendum Britain, the hollow promise of resurgent Scottish nationalism, and the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe. We argue that against this backdrop, minority women are once again pathologically present but politically absent. What politics of survival lies on the horizon? Rather than prescribing the way forward we insist on political attentiveness to the struggles unfolding in new, creative and subversive ways led by minority women at some times and in some places on their own terms.

This book examines minority women’s experiences of and activism within the austerity regimes of France and Britain. Through in depth case studies of the particular dynamics of austerity and activism in Scotland, England and France, we explore how activists operate in this moment of political and economic uncertainty and practice a ‘politics of survival’ (Hill Collins 2000). It explores how race, class, gender and legal status interact and shape both minority women’s grassroots anti-austerity activism in each country and what kinds of claims and political actors are recognised and legitimated by both policymakers and civil society allies. It is interested in who is audible and legitimate and how these hierarchies of knowledge and political credibility are reproduced or overthrown. Centering minority women’s articulations of both crisis and resistance is a way to subvert the dominant narrative of both ‘crisis’ and ‘activism’.

In this chapter we explore minority women’s strategies for survival in informal spaces: self help groups, DIY networks and grassroots community organisations, as well as our participants’ personal narratives of and reflections on coping within neoliberal third sector organisations. Throughout this book ‘activism’ is defined broadly in order to capture the diverse ways in which minority women assert themselves as political agents. We argue that minority women’s activism is either misrecognised or erased by the white left. Given this hostility to a politics that is organised on the basis of race, gender and legal status, this problematises the solidarity work that minority women activists seek to build with their white counterparts as well as ignoring the political dimensions of selfcare. We centre the activism of minority women and note that it is often connected to third sector spaces and should not be dismissed as ‘inauthentic’ for this reason. We conclude by demanding that this politics of survival be recognised as a first step toward solidarity and alliances.

In this chapter we take a step back to think across the three cases, and ‘beyond’ them. In Section 1, we reflect on our cases in order to avoid the analytical straightjacket of national ‘models’ that can obscure similarities as much as they also elucidate differences. In Section 2, we move ‘beyond’ these cases in the sense of thinking about the internationalist and autonomous dimensions of intersectional and minority women-led organising that we see in the creative, subversive and influential voices and actions of new actors and movements in both France and Britain.

In this introductory chapter, we discuss the three national contexts in which our research project was based, highlighting the particular citizenship regimes of each country and the implications for our minority women activists. We then move on to provide further details about the research, detailing our methods, sampling, participant characteristics and coding and analysis frame. We define the key terms that we will be using throughout this book. Finally, we conclude with an overview of how the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent austerity measures impacted on minority and migrant women in France and Britain.

This chapter analyses two instances where young, racialised men have only been listened to and remembered when they act against the state: the 2011 English ‘riots’ when young black men and ‘chavs’ were portrayed as criminals ‘pure and simple’ and the French emeutes [uprisings] of 2005 where young men in the suburbs were referred to as ‘racaille’ (‘scum’) by the then Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy. They are seen as antipolitical objects, in contrast to being heard differently than we want to be which is part of political life (Bickford 1996). The binary of ‘Us and Them’, dictated by a law and order agenda, leaves no space for listening to a political reading of events that may require change from ‘Us’. In the process the past is lost.

This chapter explores debates over gender, culture and religion, for example headscarves and the use of religious arbitration (so-called ‘sharia tribunals’) in France, England and Canada. Minority women, most visibly Muslim women, are often only audible when speaking as ‘victims’ or ‘entrepreneurs’. Norms of audibility shaped by a binary division of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ mean minority women are selectively audible: when conforming to racist stereotypes of victimised Muslim women or, under austerity in third sector spaces, when speaking as social entrepreneurs, a neoliberal language which comes at a cost. It is a struggle to connect listening to politics and be heard on one’s own terms, to engage with others as equal, interdependent peers, when speaking both to the state and horizontally to ‘fellow citizens’.

The emerging activism of two groups of ‘non-citizens’ in Canada is considered: migrant justice and Indigenous activists. Some migrant justice activists increasingly acknowledge the need to recast their actions and ideology to recognise and support the struggles of Indigenous peoples. These relatively powerless actors listen to one another and reconfigure meanings of land, nation and justice. Migrant justice activists change political slogans and practices. Meaning is recast through reciprocal, interdependent exchange creating a passageway between the experiences of people otherwise divided by ongoing colonisation. Through a horizontal politics of listening they redefine the mutual ‘Us’ that listening creates, away from the state and ‘citizens’. Instead a separate space of solidarity is created on autonomous terms and political equality enacted.

This chapter explains the aims of the book: to explore listening as a social and political process. The politics of listening can disrupt power and privilege and harmful binaries of ‘Us and Them’, with the aim of political equality. The chapter explores why we should listen and how, in adversarial, tense and unequal political moments. This intervention takes place at the boundary of politics and sociology. Key characteristics of a politics of listening are identified – interdependence, recognition and micropolitics – in dialogue with the work of key scholars Les Back, Susan Bickford and Nick Couldry. The ‘where’ and ‘when’ of a politics of listening are outlined: the possibilities and challenges for democratic life in France, Canada, England, that each chapter then explores.

In this chapter we examine minority women’s institutionalised precarity in pre and post crisis France and Britain. Minority women must negotiate a paradox of misrecognition—they are simultaneously invisible and hypervisbile in the constructions of poverty, the economic crisis and austerity in these two countries. Even though minority women experience institutionalised social and economic inequalities, too often their experiences and perspectives are erased or devalued by social movement ‘allies’ and policymakers alike. Despite their calculated erasure, minority women are organising and mobilising in innovative ways to resist their inequality and advance their intersectional social justice claims.