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In the 1990s, an essentialist, bounded understanding of culture delimiting (ethno-national) groups based on allegedly discrete sets of natural characteristics came to structure politics in North Atlantic migration contexts, justifying migrant exclusion or celebrating inclusion. Yet, how this idea of "culture-as-defining-attribute" works among people situated in everyday life remains understudied. We develop an analytical framework centred on discursive repertoires, sources of relational meaning-production, anchored in historical contexts, and embedded in power. Analyzing 125 essays written by Toronto and Neuchâtel undergraduate students, we demonstrate that using culture-as-defining-attribute results in an in/visibilization of power relations. Toronto students hypervisibilize a positively inflected conviviality across multicultural diversity, while invisibilizing racism and settler colonialism. Neuchâtel students visibilize the production of migranticized others, invisibilizing nativism and non-migrant/white structural privileges. We end with a plea for context-specific analysis of culture-as-defining-attribute and a deeper understanding of in/visibilization as a significant "missing link" in current analyses of culture and ex/inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyze headscarf debates that unfolded in the first decade of the twenty-first century in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Through a socio-historical overview looking at newspaper articles and policy and legal documents, we show how the headscarf has become a site for negotiating immigrant-related, postcolonial difference. We argue that certain feminist understanding of gender liberation and postcolonial difference in the headscarf debates reveal the continuity of control mechanisms from the colonial to the postcolonial era. We highlight the possibilities for decolonial thought and practice by centering the situatedness of headscarf. This allows us to show how Muslim citizens are active participants in producing contemporary Western European histories even as some of their practices face overt rejection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bordering situates immigrant sex workers at the margins of an already marginalised industry and naturalises the legal conditions of their dispossession and precarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, we offer a situated intersectional analysis of the everyday bordering experiences of Muslim trans*immigrant sex workers from Bulgaria (hereafter TISWs). Focusing on three interactional contexts – minority belonging within EU and German politics, encounters with medicolegal institutions, and the new sex work regulation in Germany – our study demonstrates both that everyday bordering experiences derive not solely from national border enforcement and citizenship regulation but also from intersectional sociocultural barriers imposed by non-state actors, while the internal bordering practices of the German state exacerbate the exclusion and marginalisation of sex/gender transgressive people and sex work. We conclude that despite their physical existence as EU citizens in Berlin, TISWs' everyday bordering experiences require a more nuanced understanding of intersectional systems of oppression which postpones TISWs' arrival in Berlin indefinitely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boundary regimes consist of multiple discursive and material registers in media, politics, law and everyday interaction. We show how "safety" and "danger," as key concepts of symbolic boundaries, produce particular understandings of Muslim masculinities. In Canada, the government discussed (but did not enact) placing single Syrian men at the bottom of the admissible to-be-resettled refugee list in 2015. In Cologne, Germany, refugee men were accused of sexually assaulting a large number of women in 2015. Focusing on "safety" and "danger" discourses, we show that symbolic boundaries had limited material impact in Canada while they informed major legal changes in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2015, in Canada, political discourse on "honour"-based violence has shifted away from highly problematic understandings of "culture" as the cause of violence among racialized, Muslim, and immigrant communities. Instead, talk of culture has dropped out of the equation altogether in favour of more structural definitions of gender-based violence (GBV). In this article, we ask what gets lost when culture is not taken into account when talking about or trying to understand forms of GBV. Drawing from theoretical conceptualizations of culture -- defined as "situated practices of meaning-making" that shape all experiences of violence, and societal responses to violence -- we argue for a multiscalar approach to culture. To illustrate this framework, we first offer a critical analysis of Aruna Papp's 2012 memoir Unworthy Creature as an exemplar of stigmatizing uses of culture and a key text promoted by the Conservative federal government at the time. We then turn to interviews we conducted with service providers serving South Asian survivors of GBV in Toronto from 2011 to 2013. Our analysis illustrates how to talk about culture as a key ingredient shaping multiscalar violence, regardless of whether that violence occurs in majority or minority communities. We conclude with three policy implications for addressing HBV moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing parties' media representations in the context of France's 2010 legal ban of Islamic facial coverings and Québec's (rejected) Charter of Values in 2013, this paper foregrounds the neglected role that party competition plays in shaping the construction of nationhood in public debates around immigrant religious practices. Our findings show that in these debates, political parties aim to maintain their distinct identities by generating a particular universalism, in which purportedly "universal" values, such as gender equality, are imbricated with particularistic images of nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I focus on the management of postcolonial difference and the production of belonging in a white settler nation-state in order to rethink the notion of co-optation. I first develop a theoretical framework for understanding co-optation by separating the "who" and the "what" of co-optation: actors who embody diversity in public, political debate become the "who" of co-optation, as their agency is shaped by gendered and racialized processes of subject making. The "what" of cooptation revolves around particular conceptualizations of practices, rights and freedoms, associated in this case with "gender equality," which is rendered an empty signifier in the process. I then illustrate this framework by drawing from research on the Sharia-based arbitration debate that took place in Ontario, Canada, between late 2003 and early 2006. I focus on the claims of two Canadian Muslim women activists to show that co-optation occurs as attempts to further liberation instead advance illiberal practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understood as a philosophy counselling group rights and concomitant public policies undertaken by governments to preserve and enhance group identities, multiculturalism has little purchase in European immigrant integration debates. However, based on interviews with various actors engaged in policies that affect immigrants in the Netherlands and Germany, we argue that multiculturalism remains a going concern if it is understood as a problem-solving practice through which governments acknowledge and work with ethnic and religious groups to address issues of mutual concern, particularly on issues related to gender. We label this ‘multicultural governance’ and argue that it supports the principal ends of integration policy: the socialization of immigrants into prevailing national languages, norms and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]