Search

This paper explores the ways an elite girls' secondary school context influences one Vietnamese Australian schoolgirl's engagement with interculturality. As well as thinking about and interacting with others respectfully and equitably, interculturality encompasses thinking reflexively about the influence of one's own background, and systems of power, on such thoughts and interactions. Analysis is based on interviews conducted with Kate (a pseudonym) when she was in Years 7–9 of secondary school and aged approximately 12–15 years old. I argue that Kate's awareness of ways she is minoritised and/or marginalised at school help her to identify and critique structural racism. However, I also highlight that Kate's relative success within Kirkswood College's highly competitive academic environment impedes her ability to critique inequity. This is because her take-up of discourses of self-improvement and meritocracy potentially hinder her ability to recognise structural bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores movements for social transformation in precarious times of austerity, dispossessed commons and narrow nationalism; movements counterpoised to an exhausted neoliberalism on the one hand, and a neoconservative xenophobic populism on the other. Applying ‘rainbow coalition’ as generic concept it points at contours of a globally extended countermovement for social transformation, traversing ‘race’, class and gender, driven by reimaginings of the commons and indicating how they could be repossessed and democratically ruled; that is ‘reimagineered’). A multisited enquiry explores how actors express their claims as activist citizens under varying conditions and constellations, and if/how discourses and practices from different locations and at different scales inform each other. It interrogates whether there may be an actual equivalence of outlook, objective and strategy of ostensibly homologous contending movements which develop under varying local, national and regional circumstances in contemporary communities riveted by schisms of class, ‘race’/ethnicity and gender, occupied by the ‘migration’ issue and challenged by popular demands for social sustainability. The paper contributes to social theory by linking questions posed by critics of ‘post-politics’ concerning contingences of pluralist democracy and revitalised politics of civil society, to precarity studies focused on globalisation and the changing conditions of citizenship, labour and livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, artists of ethnic minority backgrounds are generally offered marginal spaces in which they can express themselves. They tend to be called upon by the state to act as cultural brokers or offer representations of their supposedly neatly bounded communities in the name of social inclusion [Werbner 1997. Introduction: the dialectics of cultural hybridity. In: P. Werbner and T. Modood, eds.Debating cultural hybridity: multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism. London: Zed Books, 1–28]. The aim of this paper is to highlight how processes of racialisation and multiculturalist discourses produce specific vocational identities, namely that of the ethnic minority, community artist who uses their creative forms of expression to redress social inequalities. Drawing on the findings of an in-depth, qualitative study with young, male, Arab-Australian creative workers during 2011–2014, I suggest that this particular vocational trajectory is indicative of the classed, exclusionary and hierarchical nature of the creative industries. The paper pays close attention to the ways they use creativity strategically to deal with broader issues of race-relations and experiences of discrimination to suggest that these ethnic minority creative workers potentially become what Brubaker calls ‘ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ [2002. Ethnicity without groups.European journal of sociology, 43 (2), 163–189, p. 166] who live off as well as for their cultural difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gentrification is transforming the class and ethnic profile of urban communities across the world, and changing how people deal with social and cultural difference. This paper looks at some of the social consequences of gentrification in Sydney, Australia, focusing on local schools. It argues that in this urban Australian context, the influx of middle-class Anglo-Australians into traditionally working-class, migrant-dominated areas is significantly changing how people relate to each other within local schools, often fragmenting and dividing school communities. These shifts are intensified by the public policy of school choice, which has enabled some parents to bypass their local school for a more ‘desirable’ one. This paper presents a close local study of two schools within one gentrifying Sydney suburb, examining how the schools have become more polarised. In particular, we examine how this demographic polarisation has given rise to two distinct modes of ‘doing diversity’, namely, ‘everyday’ and ‘cosmo-multiculturalisms’. While the former is about daily, normalised encounters across difference, the latter is a form of multiculturalism based on strategic and learned ‘appreciation’ and consumption of difference, characteristic of gentrified communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a case study of food relations between female employers and non-indigenous domestic workers in the city of Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. The paper argues that food and eating are still powerful racial and class markers among people in Mexico regardless of their ethnic adscription. The paper describes the history of food relations in Mexico and illustrates the parallels between ideas of culinary and human mestizaje as imagined founders of Mexico's national identity. In doing so, it identifies the complexities of addressing racism among a group of women workers that, in theory, are imagined as mixed while, in practice, are part of an occupation that has been and is still heavily racialised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1Sydney’s 2005 Cronulla Riots marked a watershed moment in race relations between White and Arabic-speaking Australians. In this essay, I reflect on how the riots now sit in the public imagination and explore how certain narratives on the riots have produced a series of problematic silences, disownings, and forgettings. I elaborate six modes of denial and disavowal – modes of sidestepping and disowning the racism that underpinned the riot and more contemporary attitudes towards Muslim Australians. The paper is framed around six ‘modes’ of silence: (1) Always Elsewheres, Always Someone Else; (2) The Spectacular; (3) The Narrative of ‘Past-ness’; (4) Twisted Tolerance; (5) Slippery Humour; (6) Interpolation of Non-Arab Subjects into the White Project. Some claim that the Cronulla Riots were an aberration and many in the ‘Shire’ wish that attention would move on. After all, the riots were a decade ago and the ‘kids’ who participated have all grown up. There has been no trouble on the beach since. I suggest, however, that the riots have a much longer reach – culturally, geographically, and temporally – than is generally understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how the Cronulla riots have shaped some popular directions in theory and practice regarding young people’s intercultural relations that are primarily focused on social cohesion, harmony and cultural understanding. Drawing on research we have undertaken post-Cronulla with young people in some of Australia’s most diverse (and disadvantaged) neighbourhoods, we suggest that this approach to improving youth interculturality does not adequately account for the complex forms of sociality that exist in multicultural youth cultures. We illustrate how routine and intimate intercultural engagements are interwoven with forms of discord, some of it racialised and racist, but not always destructive of simultaneous positive fellow-feeling. We argue for greater attention to the multiple lines along which youth affiliate, connect and also differentiate themselves that inform their practices of inclusion and exclusion beyond lack of cultural understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using data derived chiefly from the Somali community in Minneapolis, Minnesota, this paper explores the challenges confronting its youth. The findings are the result of an ongoing ethnographic engagement with this community that has been conducted for over a decade. Stressing that marginalisation is due to the combined impact of race, religion and class, the article points to the factors that have led some youth in the direction of drugs and crime while others have opted for radical Islam. In the post-9/11 era of securitisation, with evidence of over-policing of the Somali community, the challenges to incorporation are intensified due to the ongoing Othering process of this refugee group. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent that theorists of white privilege vary in their emphasis of intersectionality. Since few theorists incorporate gender, theoretical differences that explain why some authors emphasise class differences and others not are identified. Race and class intersect for the following reasons: First, investment in whiteness is viewed as a means to achieving greater material resources, and is not an end in itself. Second, white privilege is historically located by explanations of how specific occupations or income levels of whites benefit from direct material conflict with non-whites. Third, materially based conflict among whites is a significant factor for between-race conflicts, as claims of white privilege made by working whites are said to be motivated by a combination of compensation for within-race class exploitation and a judgment that the material conditions of non-whites were too similar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines gender- and nation-specific forms of capital through migration. It focuses on first-generation Swedish women moving to a new social and political landscape in the USA, typically from upper- and middle-class environments in Sweden. Their migratory experiences are used as a departure to analyse how former class positions are being re-enacted (or not) in the neo-liberal USA. The study, conducted from 2006 to 2008, is based on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with 33 women and three of their spouses and participant observations in a support group for Swedish-speaking women in the Western region of the USA. Using an intersectional analysis, it is suggested that Swedish women are located in contradictory class positions in the USA in terms of the loss of social and cultural capital, access to the social democratic welfare state and a dependence on racialised labour in a different social geography. It is argued that the women's class privileges are shaped, transformed and reproduced through their capacities to re-invest their cultural and embodied forms of capital in marriage and by marking a distance to subordinated groups, often other migrant women, thereby mirroring the unequal relations between (migrating) women in a global arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dabki is a folkloric dance enacted by Lebanese migrants in Australia. This paper examines this dance and shows that it is invested with many issues pertaining to the harsh realities of Lebanese migrants in Australia. In doing so, it criticises the reified understanding of the dabki that reduces it to a mere spectacle and a metaphor for Lebanese identity. Our analysis of the dabki shows the irreducible complexity of this cultural practice deriving from social processes that surround its production. These processes pertaining to the experience of displacement, discrimination and a change in gender and class relations result in imputing new meanings to the dabki and transforming some of its formal aspects. Overall, these changes alter the dabki and make it a site of contradictory investments: an object of intrusive gaze by the dominant culture, a strategy of building the unity of the Lebanese community, a symbolic reversal of inequality between the migrant and the host society, a site of changing class and gender relations and a strategy of re-connecting with the home of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the place of Australia within the network of sites through which Japanese Brazilian migrants move. In doing so, it aims to demonstrate the importance of moving beyond a bi-focal analysis of transnationalism to one which encompasses a multiplicity of sites and migrants’ diverse strategies to cross these national borders. Here I analyse the triangular circulation of young middle-class Japanese Brazilians and the establishment of transnational social fields among Brazil, Japan and Australia. I argue that in order to negotiate these multiple borders, Japanese Brazilians mobilise economic, social and cultural capitals and by doing so undergo changes in subjectivity in all three nodes of this triangular circulation. Moreover, I contend that their middle-class status makes for a very specific migration pattern in which acquiring cultural capital (which will later be converted into economic capital) is more important than migrating in search of economic capital alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]