Bindi Shah

Explaining Educational Achievement and Career Aspirations among Young British Pakistanis: Mobilizing ‘Ethnic Capital’?

This article offers an explanation for recent trends that indicate higher numbers of young British Pakistani men and women pursue higher education compared to their white peers. Our qualitative research provides evidence for shared norms and values amongst British Pakistani families, what we term ‘ethnic capital’. However, our findings also highlight differences between families. The Bourdieuian notion of ‘cultural capital’ explains educational success among middle-class British Pakistani families. We argue, however, that insufficient attention has been given to the relation between education and ethnicity, and particularly the role of ‘ethnic capital’ in ameliorating social class disadvantage. Our research also recognizes the limitations of ‘ethnic capital’ and traces the interplay of ethnicity with gender and religion that produces differences between, and within, working-class British Pakistani families. We also emphasize how structural constraints, selective school systems and racialized labour markets, influence the effectiveness of ‘ethnic capital’ in promoting educational achievement and social mobility.

‘From cricket lover to terror suspect’ – challenging representations of young British Muslim men

In contemporary media and policy debates young British Muslim men are frequently described as experiencing cultural conflict, as alienated, deviant, underachieving, and as potential terrorists. In this article we seek to convey the everyday negotiations, struggles and structural constraints that shape the lives of young British Pakistani Muslim men in particular. We draw on interviews with British Pakistani Muslim men aged between 16 and 27 in Slough and Bradford. These are from a broader project, which focused on the link between education and ethnicity, and analysed the ways in which values and norms related to education, jobs and career advancement are accommodated, negotiated or resisted in the context of their families, communities and the wider society. A range of masculinities emerge in our data and we argue that these gender identities are defined in relational terms, to other ways of being Pakistani men and to being men in general, as well as to Pakistani femininities. While we recognise the fluidity, instability and situatedness of social identities, we also illustrate the ways in which masculinities are negotiated at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, religion, age and place and enacted within contexts which are themselves subjected to racialised and gendered processes. Our findings offer a varied and contextual understanding of British Pakistani masculinities.

Being young, female and Laotian: Ethnicity as social capital at the intersection of gender, generation, ‘race’ and age

Abstract Scholarship on the children of post-1965 immigrants to the USA posits that the ways in which this new second generation relates to family and the co-ethnic community has important effects on their educational achievement and socio-economic mobility. These linkages have been explained through the concept of ethnicity as social capital. Utilizing qualitative data on second generation Laotian girls participating in an ethnic specific youth project focused on social justice issues, this article evaluates this conceptualization of social capital from a critical feminist perspective. I argue that a singular focus on ethnic social relations occludes the complex life experiences of the children of immigrants. I examine the ways in which gender and generational power relations within ethnic communities, extra-familial social influence, the impact of social contexts and structural constraints, and the role of youth as generators of social capital complicates the role of ethnicity as social capital in adaptation outcomes.

Religion in the everyday lives of second-generation Jains in Britain and the USA: resources offered by a dharma-based South Asian religion for the construction of religious biographies, and negotiating risk and uncertainty in late modern societies

While the growth of spiritualties is associated with post-traditional societies and the ability of individuals to engage in reflexive construction of religious biographies in late modernity, these arguments ignore various dimensions of reflexivity and processes of re-traditionalization. In this article I explore linkages and affinity between social discourses in late modernity and a religion, with a distinctive ontology, originating in South Asia. Drawing on qualitative data, I examine processes involved in the construction of a religious self among second-generation Jains in Britain and the USA. Living in late modern societies, young Jains have established a reflexive habitus. Such reflexivity has affinity with a neo-orthodox tendency in Jainism that rejects the authority of ascetics and rituals while elevating ones own knowledge, discipline and insights in the construction of a Jain biography. I find that neo-orthodox Jainism provides resources for young Jains to constantly reflect on and actively choose how to be a Jain; to enact cataphatic reflexivity in the construction of a Jain self. For some second-generation Jains, the Jain tradition also provides resources to enact a non-instrumental, apophatic reflexivity; a calm equanimous state that enables them to create ontological security in the face of risks and uncertainty in late modernity.

Educational Achievement and Career Aspiration for Young British Pakistanis

In this chapter we report on research conducted between 2004 and 2006 in Slough and Bradford which investigated the educational aspirations and experiences of young British Pakistani Muslim men and women.1 Our research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust within a wider programme on migration and citizenship, sought to understand the extent to which young British Pakistanis were making progress in terms of educational achievement and employment in relation to their peers and in relation to the wider findings of successive reports on the differential achievements of ethnic groups (Modood and Shiner, 1994; Modood et al., 1997). Our qualitative study explored the attitudes and dispositions towards education and career aspirations held by a range of young people including both those who had achieved a measure of success (entry into higher education, for example, or professional qualifications) and those who had left compulsory education with few qualifications including those who remained unemployed. One starting point for this research was work by Zhou (2000, 2005) on the high academic achievements of Asian-Americans (particularly those of Vietnamese and Chinese heritage) which posited the role of ‘ethnic social capital’ as being particularly significant in promoting academic achievement through the enforcement of familial and community norms. We wanted to see whether similar forms of ‘ethnic capital’ (Modood, 2004) also operated within Pakistani Muslim communities and whether they were significant in shaping improved educational outcomes for young people.