Akwugo Emejulu

Neoliberalism with a community face?: A critical analysis of asset-based community development in Scotland

In this article, we trace the ideological and social policy roots of asset-based community development (ABCD) in the United States and the United Kingdom, and explore how this approach has been legitimized in Scotland. We argue that ABCD is a capitulation to neoliberal values of individualization and privatization. Drawing on findings from our empirical work, we discuss how ABCD generates dilemmas for community development. Although some practitioners are able to adapt ABCD to focus on renewing Scottish democracy, several practitioners are using ABCD to privatize public issues such as inequality and justify dramatic cuts to the Scottish welfare state.

Struggles for Institutional Space in France and the United Kingdom: Intersectionality and the Politics of Policy

This article uses intersectionality as an analytical tool to explore struggles for institutional space in policy processes in two ostensibly contrasting contexts: “republican” France and the “multicultural” United Kingdom. Specifically, the article undertakes within-case analysis of three policy processes. In France, we discuss the debate over laicite , or secularism, the subsequent formulation of the March 2004 law banning the wearing of religious signs in state schools, and the creation of the High Authority for the Fight Against Discrimination (HALDE). In the UK, we examine the problem definitions, language, and subject positions constructed by the 2008 Single Equality Bill. The result of these analyses is that institutional actors employ similar (though not identical) practices in relation to intersections, which have similar outcomes for minority groups on either side of the English Channel. Through what we term a “logic of separation,” institutional actors severely curtail the “institutional space” available to minority ethnic groups to make complex and intersectional social justice claims. Even though France and the UK are often portrayed as opposites with regard to constructions of citizenship, we argue that these seemingly differing traditions of citizenship end up having a similar effect of misrecognizing minority women and mens experiences and demands.

Minority women and austerity : survival and resistance in France and Britain

In the first book of its kind, Bassel and Emejulu explore minority women’s experiences of and resistances to austerity measures in France and Britain. Minority women are often portrayed as passive victims. However, Minority women and austerity demonstrates how they use their race, class, gender and legal status as a resource for collective action in the face of the neoliberal colonisation of non-governmental organisations, the failures of left-wing politics and the patronising initiatives of policy-makers. Using in-depth case studies, this book explores the changing relations between the state, the market and civil society which create opportunities and dilemmas for minority women activists. Through an intersectional ‘politics of survival’ these women seek to subvert the dominant narratives of ‘crisis’ and ‘activism’.

Solidarity under Austerity: Intersectionality in France and the United Kingdom

In this article, we argue that in order to understand and counter the asymmetrical effects of the current economic crisis, intersectional analyses and coalition building are required. Our research aims to address a tendency in some intersectionality research to underplay or sideline social class and capitalist relations (Anthias 2012, 6, 15; Skeggs 2008). Our goal is to expand intersectionality to questions of political economy that are not typically viewed through this lens (Strolovitch 2013, 168). Sophisticated theorizations of social locations, divisions, processes of differentiation, and systems of domination (Dhamoon 2011) within intersectionality literature can thus become tools to name and challenge the effects of the economic crises that are deepening social and economic inequalities in Europe.

Minority women, austerity and activism

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’.

Travelling with intersectionality across time, place and space

This special issue is inspired by the debates generated by our Scottish Universities Insight Institute international seminar series entitled: Children’s Rights, Social Justice and Social Identities in Scotland: Intersections in Research, Policy and Practice (2013–2014). For this special issue we seek to bring together the fields of children’s geographies, childhood and youth studies and key debates about intersectionality, in order to examine children’s complex identities and experiences of social, political and economic inequalities in diverse social-spatial contexts. Although intersectionality is receiving greater attention among childhood/youth studies and geographies scholars, (Alanen 2016; Burman 2013; Gutierrez and Hopkins 2014; Konstantoni et al. 2014) to date, there has not been a serious consideration of the politics and practices of intersectionality in these interdisciplinary fields. This special issue attempts to fill this gap in knowledge. ‘Intersectionality’ refers to the ways in which race, class, gender, age, sexuality, disability and other categories of difference interact and the implications of these interactions for relations of power (Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 1991; Davis 2008; Hancock 2007; Hill Collins 2000; Hopkins and Pain 2007; Valentine 2007; Yuval-Davis 2011). Intersectional perspectives recognise the heterogeneity of different social groups and examine how particular individuals and groups are both systematically marginalised in different spaces, places and times but also use their positions at the intersections of certain categories as resources for activism and resistance. The concept of intersectionality has become ever more popular across a variety of disciplines and contexts, and there have been a range of debates within feminist political science and sociology which develop and contest its meanings and operationalisations. For instance, Skeggs (2005) argues that debates about intersectionality do not sufficiently attend to class production and political economy. Butler (1990) and Yuval-Davis (2011) have an ongoing discussion about the ontological bases of categories of difference. There is also a longstanding debate about additive versus constitutive intersectionality as seen in the work of Weldon (2006) and Hancock (2007). And of course, there is an enduring Black feminist critique of seeking to apply intersectionality outside the particularities of Black women’s experiences and politics (Alexander-Floyd 2012; Bilge 2013; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Jordan-Zachery 2013). Some intersectional approaches have stressed the importance of place and location (Anthias 2012) and have made use of geographical metaphors, conceptualising intersectionality, for example, as a crossroad (Crenshaw 1991) or as axes of difference (Yuval-Davis 2011). The richness of debate about intersectionality demonstrates the complexity of processes of exclusion and inequality. This special issue does not seek to resolve these tensions, but to demonstrate how geographers and other scholars with an interest in children and childhoods might contribute to and advance these debates about the meanings and purposes of intersectionality in relation to children, time, space and place. The contributions of this special issue to the fields of children’s geographies and childhood studies are threefold: First, this special issue brings together parallel debates in childhood studies and children’s geographies in order to illuminate critical understandings of both intersectionality and childhood

Towards a radical digital citizenship in digital education

ABSTRACT In this article, we attempt to define and explore a concept of ‘radical digital citizenship’ and its implications for digital education. We argue that the ‘digital’ and its attendant technologies are constituted by on-going materialist struggles for equality and justice in the Global South and North which are erased in the dominant literature and debates in digital education. We assert the need for politically informed understandings of the digital, technology and citizenship and for a ‘radical digital citizenship’ in which critical social relations with technology are made visible and emancipatory technological practices for social justice are developed.

Community development as micropolitics : comparing theories, policies and politics in America and Britain

Community development is routinely invoked as a practical solution to tackle a myriad of social problems, even though there is little consensus about its meaning and purpose. Through a comparative analysis of competing perspectives on community development since 1968, this book critically examines the contradictory ideas and practices that have shaped this field in the US and the UK. This approach exposes a problematic politics that have far-reaching consequences for those committed to working for social justice. This accessible book offers an alternative model for thinking about the politics of community development and so will appeal to academics, postgraduate students and community development workers.

Whose Crisis Counts? Minority Women, Austerity and Activism in France and Britain

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.

When intersectionality met childhood studies: The dilemmas of a travelling concept

Childhood studies/geographies have a longstanding interest in questions around multiple social inequalities and identities in diverse socio-spatial contexts, but have not yet seriously considered the politics of intersectionality. Importing intersectionality into childhood studies is neither a straightforward nor an unproblematic process. We suggest that the question that childhood studies/geographies scholars must confront is how intersectionality can be used in this interdisciplinary field in ways which recognise and take seriously the intellectual history and labour of Black women and preserve the integrity of intersectionality’s radical praxis of emancipatory knowledge production and collective action for social justice. This article examines how intersectionality and its emancipatory politics might be preserved, strengthened and enhanced when it is operationalised in a context of childhood studies/geographies.