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Accommodating Otherness: anti-asylum centre protest and the maintenance of white privilege.
- Source :
-
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers . Mar2005, Vol. 30 Issue 1, p52-65. 14p. - Publication Year :
- 2005
-
Abstract
- Geographers have recently progressed the debate on NIMBYism by demonstrating that opposition to new development is frequently motivated by white residents’ desire to exclude non-white groups. In this paper, I extend this argument by exploring community opposition to a proposed accommodation centre for asylum seekers in Nottinghamshire (UK). Herein, I detail a rhetoric of opposition that ignored the multiple origins and ethnicities of asylum seekers to depict them as an undifferentiated Other group. Though local campaigners rarely referred directly to their own‘whiteness’, I argue their campaign can only be understood within a racialized problematic, constituting an attempt to defend the privileges of an‘unmarked’ whiteness against the imagined threat of a racialized Other. In conclusion, I argue that studies of NIMBYism must take careful account of the contingency of racial identities if they are to effectively contribute to the geographic literature that seeks to de-centre white privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00202754
- Volume :
- 30
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 16580130
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00151.x