Bolette Moldenhawer

Transnational migrant communities and education strategies among Pakistani youngsters in Denmark

Education has become an increasingly important factor in relation to migration and the social reproduction strategies of migrants. This article examines how migration and its minority/majority relational dimension play a part in the development of education strategies of Pakistani youngsters. Transnational migration research has shown that the relation of minority groups to the receiving society is clearly affected by local migration strategies, continuing relations with the place of origin, and the actual opportunities available in the host society. The transnational perspective is also crucial to understanding how minorities conceive their host society and the ‘national’ schooling system, and how they manage within these. Following a discussion of the notions of transnational migration, transnationalism and transnational migrant communities, I examine the significance of transnational migrant communities for understanding the education strategies of Pakistani youngsters in Denmark. Pakistani minorities have a long history of experience with migration and the need to integrate a widening and varied set of socio-economic conditions across local and national boundaries. Employing education as a social mobility strategy has become a more common practice among groups in traditionally caste-dominated social relations. Furthermore, among Pakistani migrant communities, biradari relations also operate as a flexible social category that affects the opportunities groups have to convert economic capital into schooling and education capital, and future symbolic capital.

Disturbed by ‘the stranger’: state crafting remade through educational interventions and moralisations

This article addresses two questions. First, how does a state, in casu the Danish welfare state, based on universalism and social rights as regards its citizens, deal with immigrants and their descendants through education? Second, how does such a state manage to make its differential treatment of human beings work legitimately, that is, what arguments, what interventions and moralisations, are used through the workings of school education? The article carries out an analysis of policies since the 1980s and depicts the construction of ‘the stranger’ parallel to an analysis of the state crafting processes that go on in terms of professional educational interventions in Højmarken School, a school placed in an urban poor area.

Making precarious immigrant families and weaving the Danish welfare nation-state fabric 1970–2010

Abstract This article explores the making of immigrant families as precarious elements in the governing of the population’s welfare within the Danish welfare nation-state since the 1970s. The emphasis is on how immigrant families became a problem of welfare governing, and what knowledge practices and welfare techniques emerged as problem-solving responses. The article analyses a diverse set of national and local administrative documents advancing a polyhedron of intelligibility by which the authors discover how problem-solving complexes responsive to immigrant families change and sediment, and ultimately, weave the fabric of a Danish welfare nation-state faced with non-Western immigration after the economic boom in the late 1960s.

Turkish and Kurdish Speaking Teachers in the Danish Folkeskole: the ambiguous concept of equality

Abstract The proportion of ethnic minority teachers in the Danish folkeskole who are graduates of a Danish college of education has risen steadily over the last decade. This article describes the functions that Turkish and Kurdish speaking minority teachers are supposed to perform and goes on to discuss the effect those functions have on their chances of being accepted on an equal footing with Danish majority teachers. Despite their Danish teaching qualifications, the article reaches the conclusion that minority teachers are still appointed to attend to specific tasks to do with the integration of Turkish and Kurdish speaking minority pupils. Furthermore, they occupy a subordinate position in relation to the majority teachers and face the dilemma that neither their general professional qualifications nor their bilingual and cultural qualifications are acknowledged. It will be argued that equality is an ambivalent concept, best understood in relation to the cultural and structurally conditioned differences...