Christopher Kyriakides

Migrant labour, racism and the British National Health Service

This study explores the dynamics of racism, specifically its generation and reproduction as an ideology, and its role in affecting the reception and occupational location of migrant medical labour in Britain. It is argued that the treatment of ‘overseas doctors’ in Britain draws on a complex interplay between racism and nationalism underpinned by the historical construction of ‘welfarism’ as a moral legitimator of ‘Britishness’. Through an exploration of internal and external immigration controls introduced with the aim of regulating migrant labour, we demonstrate how British social policy and elite discourses of ‘race’ combine to construct moral prescriptions of threat such that migrants and British-born ‘non-whites’ entering the British medical profession are forced to negotiate ‘saviour/pariah’ ascriptions indicative of discriminatory but contradictory processes specific to the operation of the British National Health Service as a normative institution.

Racism, Muslims and the National Imagination

This qualitative study investigates the relationship between racism and nationalism in two multi-ethnic British neighbourhoods, focusing specifically on the construction of ‘the Muslim’ as a racialised role sign. Through in-depth interviews with 102 ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ participants in Glasgow (Scotland) and Bristol (England) we investigate the extent to which ‘the Muslim’ is being demonised as an oppositional identity in the construction of English and Scottish codes of cultural belonging. We find that whilst Scottishness and Englishness draw on historically founded racialised (e.g. biological, phenotypical) referents of ‘whiteness’ at the level of the ‘multi-ethnic’ neighbourhood, such racialised codes of belonging are undermined in everyday life by hybridised codes: signifiers such as accent, dress, mannerisms and behaviours which destabilise phenotype as a concrete signifier of national belonging. However, those signifiers that contest the racialised referent are themselves reconfigured, such that contemporary signifiers of cultural values (e.g. terrorist, extremist) reinforce, but not completely, the original racialised referent. We conclude that a negative view of ‘the Muslim’ as antithetical to imagined racialised conceptions of nationhood cannot easily be sustained in the Scottish and English ‘multi-ethnic’ neighbourhood. The sign ‘Muslim’ is split such that contemporary significations perpetuate the exclusion of the ‘unhybridised foreign Muslim’.

Codes of Cultural Belonging: Racialised National Identities in a Multi-Ethnic Scottish Neighbourhood

This qualitative study investigates the relationship between race and nation in an ethnically mixed neighbourhood in Glasgow, Scotland. It finds that Scottishness has a historically founded racialised referent at the level of the neighbourhood but that this referent is undermined in everyday life by syncretic codes of cultural belonging represented by signifiers such as accent, dress and mannerisms. However, these cultural signifiers that contest the racialised referent are, on occasions, themselves challenged by negative ascriptions such as terrorist and extremist which reinforce, though never completely, the original racialised referent of Scottishness as whiteness. We conclude that whiteness is an unstable identifier of Scottishness, and Scottishness is an unstable identifier of whiteness, such that a negative view of Islam as antithetical to imagined conceptions of Scottishness, cannot easily be sustained in areas of relatively high racialised minority settlement.

Third Way anti-racism: A contextual constructionist approach

Abstract Recent debate surrounding racism and immigration in the UK reveals that anti-racist policy is being constructed within a ‘Third Way’ political agenda such that the definition of racism comes to signify a phenomenon considered detrimental to the ‘building of community’. Given the controversial role of the British state in perpetuating the ‘immigration/race-relations problematic’, this paper argues that New Labours approach to racism comes to embody a set of contradictory assumptions fostered in previous administrations while incorporating elements significant to ‘Third Way’ governance. Crucial to current policy prescription is the reconstitution of the subject of racism, such that both perpetrator and target are viewed through the policy lens of emotional governance. In short, the contemporary anti-racist state seeks to foster legitimacy via an appeal to an emotionalized subjective condition, so that policy defines racism according to the needs of state. Consequently, current ‘race-relations’ policy is an intervention which redefines racist causation while reinforcing state authority.

Words don’t come easy: Al Jazeera’s migrant–refugee distinction and the European culture of (mis)trust

Al Jazeera’s August 2015 editorial decision to substitute ‘refugee’ for ‘economic migrant’ in its coverage of ‘the Mediterranean Migration Crisis’ provides an opportunity to re-frame the relationship between the politics of race, immigration and media representations of refugees. Situating the broadcaster’s publicly announced rationale for the decision within a critique of the migrant–refugee dichotomy enforced by European public policy, this article, first, demonstrates that the policy couplet mobilizes oppositional yet interdependent identities. The discursive distancing of ‘migrant’ from ‘refugee’ in news content does not dislodge their mutually reinforcing power to define the parameters of ‘inclusion’. Second, the article examines how the policy onus placed on refugees to justify their claim as ‘victims’ reproduces racialized codes of belonging that perpetuate the denial of autonomy. Persons seeking refuge in Europe must sustain an identity of ‘non-threatening victim’ if they are to gain recognition in a securitized culture of (mis)trust. Al Jazeera’s intervention strengthens the media representation of refugees as human beings without choice; yet, the broadcaster’s decision to ‘give voice’ by ‘challenging racism’ does not break the European political consensus on immigration and asylum that positions ‘non-Western’ peoples as victim/pariah, to be ‘saved’ and ‘suspected’. The media–policy–migration nexus ensures that refugee exclusion is always possible.

“Other Than Mexicans”, “Islamic Fascists” and the transatlantic regulation of risky subjects

Post-9/11 significations of “immigration threat” link the policing of the US–Mexico border to the “war on terror” geopolitically such that domestic policies and practices related to the regulation of “undocumented” Latino migrants shape and are shaped by extra-domestic considerations related to the signification of Arab and Muslim communities. In broadening migration analysis, to include a geopolitical dimension, we are able to draw out the changing patterns of racialized population regulation within a given territory of the international state complex. Consequently, extending the geopolitical reach to include US and UK post-9/11 security regimes reveals that the logic underpinning the “Other Than Mexican” immigration category in the US, ostensibly an addition to and extension of the signification of threat posed by Latinos to the US, is neither Latino nor US specific: an idiom of threat is mobilized around “special interest aliens” as perpetrators of risk to the global social order, which broadens the domestic reach of state surveillance. The “war on terror” with related discourses of “anti-fundamentalism” and “islamofascism” specifies that risk averse surveillance documents the “elusive undocumented” carrier of terror threat, guilty by association: a cipher of fear is armed and disarmed, used to legitimate and operationalize surveillance as precautionary intervention. Through an analysis of the signification of immigration threat related to the state of Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, SB1070 in 2010 with the judicial investigation surrounding the killing of Brazilian migrant Jean Charles de Menezes by Metropolitan police on the London Underground in 2005, this study reveals how the lethal logic of Other Than Mexican regulation underpins the post-9/11 transatlantic politics of racialized risk, reconfiguring state intervention related to the “browning of America” through an “anti-fundamentalist” population control measure.

Redressing racism, communicating citizenship: state legitimation techniques in the multicultural metropolis

Apolitical social marketing communications, however intendedly neutral, acquire political capabilities when metropolitan states in search of legitimacy use them to market multiculturalism. European metropoles are under pressure to reconcile their colonial histories with the contemporary need to engage minority ethnic citizens. Yet, in the communication of cultural belonging, antiracist state redress must also enlist the consent of majority ethnic citizens. Official antiracism defines ‘racism’ according to this dual need. Our focus is One Scotland, Many Cultures – the devolved Scottish politys ₤1-million antiracist social marketing campaign launched in 2002 under the Blair governments UK-wide race strategy. Interviews with key actors responsible for the initial campaign, and content analysis of campaign advertisements, reveal that official antiracism attempts to engage disaffected multiethnic constituencies. The proposed political sociology of ethnicity and communication which informs this analysis alert...

The Allure of Race: From New Lefts to New Times

This article examines conceptual obstacles to emancipation which have emerged historically within Left theory on both sides of the Atlantic, concerned primarily with “class versus race” debates spanning from the post-war Hegelian moment to the post-structural present. While the “cultural turn” promised to give voice against structuralist silencing, the critical subject of emancipation has been defaced, eradicated such that we currently have no theoretical place from where to build an emancipatory project. We must clear an analytical space through which a renewed subject of liberation can be founded. In drawing out theoretical continuity and change across varied temporal and spatial locations—Fanon/Sartre and the French-Algerian encounter; Gilroy/Miles and British urban unrest—the article explores how the Left imaginary has lost its theoretical integrity, especially in its Foucauldian gaze, and is currently unable to provide a robust vision, beyond self-other interplay, of emancipatory change.

Refugees, capitalism and the British state: implications for social workers, volunteers and activists

race delicately insisting that race is a social category with on-going social effects that continues to shape social outcomes. Indeed much of this book is devoted to detailing the social policies that are necessary to address persistent patterns of racial inequality: the relationships between migration and labour markets, the relationship between ethnicity, housing and residency patters, the role of policing and criminal justice, persistent patterns of inequality in health and education. The current situation – set out in the Runnymede Trust website shows there is urgent need for the type of analysis this book supplies. The average household earnings of a Bangladeshi family is not only well below the national average (£238 a week instead of £393) it comes nowhere near the minimum income threshold required to sponsor relatives, thus placing a break on family unification and marriage. The social and political climate around securing UK borders (post 2001) is arguably more hostile than at any point in post-war history and skewed towards the rich. Patterns of inequality persist in job seeking, opportunities and in rates of unemployment. Moreover half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi families live below the poverty line. While BME students are over represented in higher education they are concentrated in the post 1992 universities and a Chinese graduate will earn 25% less than his or her white classmate. Five times more black men than whites are incarcerated: a disproportionality that exceeds that of the United States. Young black men are 27 times more likely than young white men to be stopped and searched without reasonable suspicion. When it comes to racial violence we need not feel complacent about perceived improvements since the (1993) murder of Stephen Lawrence – there have been 89 further racist murders. Being black is still a lethal position to occupy in the UK in the twenty-first century. This book is highly recommended for policy makers and academics concerned with persistent, if newly articulated and situated constellations of racialised and ethnicised inequalities. My only criticism is that it does not fully pursue the logic of its argument and take on the post-race debates and the neglect of racism and social policy more forcefully.