Search

In our six-nation comparative research project examining how women of colour activists in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen and Madrid organise and mobilise against austerity, against the far right and for migrants' rights, we found activists experiencing intense feelings of loneliness in their work. Emotional turmoil in activist spaces is to be expected since activists are mobilised to action precisely because of the deeply felt emotions about a particular social problem. However, we argue that activists' loneliness is a structural alienation born out of the operation of white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, queerphobia, ableism and xenophobia not only in wider society but especially in activist spaces. Women of colour activists are made lonely by the unspoken power relations effectuated through emotions. In trying to negotiate the feeling rules of their activist spaces, we argue that much of women of colour's emotion work is doomed to failure because many activist spaces are constituted by taken for granted dominations to which many women of colour activists are unable and unwilling to reconcile their feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the role of Somali refugee women's participation in the French public sphere notes that that representations of Muslim women's needs in French debates over the headscarf do not correspond to Somali women's definitions of their needs and priorities.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy instruments such as the citizenship tests and ceremonies are based on principles of deservingness: to gain access to citizenship, migrants must prove that they deserve it on the basis of criteria that are established by public authorities ([35]). Neoliberal citizenship and naturalisation policy require values of responsibility, self-improvement and productivity from migrants, to be achieved through naturalisation processes that devolve responsibility onto the individual who must seek private, marketised services ([54]). Although the changes in terms of the nature and content of naturalisation policies have been well analysed in the last decades, the question of how these policies concretely affect migrants' lives in their country of residence remains under-explored. [Extracted from the article]

Since the early 2000s several European countries have introduced language and citizenship tests as new requirements for access to long‐term residence or naturalization. The content of citizenship tests has been often presented as exclusionary in nature, in particular as it is based on the idea that access to citizenship has to be 'deserved'. In this paper, we aim to explore the citizenship tests 'from below', through the focus on the experience of migrants who prepare and take the 'Life in the UK' test, and with particular reference to how they relate to the idea of 'deservingness'. Through a set of in‐depth interviews with migrants in two different cities (Leicester and London), we show that many of them use narratives in which they distinguish between the 'deserving citizens' and the 'undeserving Others' when they reflect upon their experience of becoming citizens. In so doing, they negotiate new hierarchies of inclusion into and exclusion from citizenship, which reflect broader neo‐liberal and ethos‐based conceptions of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]